Her finger flew over the trackpad, clicking too hard.
Searching. And there, further down, the heading that made
everything true. It was like a piercing ray of sunlight cutting
straight through her brain, sunlight on eyes that had been in
the dark for a long, long time. She fractured apart when she
read the words.
One killed and two injured in horrific rollover.
She slammed the lid of the laptop shut. It wasn’t enough.
She couldn’t erase the headline from the back of her eyes. She
grabbed the laptop, wrenched the charger from it, and hurled it
across the room. It clattered against the wall and hit the floor
in one piece. Fucking brick. She wanted to destroy it so she
could unread the things she’d seen. So that she didn’t have to
know.
Morgan. My sister. Nine years old.
Giana peeled her eyelids open because she didn’t want to
see the graphic images behind them. A continuation of that
nightmare. A memory. Her sister, crumpled along with that
metal. Her body at wrong angles. Pierced. Broken glass and
blood everywhere.
“God, no.” She slammed a hand over her mouth. Found her
lips wet. Her cheeks wet. Tears coursing down all over her
face, a flood.
Her first instinct was to call her parents. It was early yet.
She’d only been asleep for an hour or two. How early, she had
no idea. She didn’t know where her phone was. She hadn’t
checked the time on her laptop. She wanted to call and wake
them up. But that would mean revisiting painful memories that
they didn’t talk about. She knew they didn’t. It would mean
admitting to them that she’d only just remembered now. That