The Hero's Redemption

Her eyes were red and puffy, her creamy redhead’s skin blotchy. Her lower lip trembled. “Why does it matter to you?”

“I don’t know,” he lied, not giving her time to call him on it. “How could you have killed me? Do you practice shooting?” The idea of her target shooting in the middle of the night—in the dark? by flashlight?—boggled his mind.

“No.” Her voice was so soft he barely heard it. “I…speed.”

“Why?”

Her defiant, bloodshot eyes met his. “I go out at night when hardly anyone else is on the highway and I drive as fast as the Cherokee will go.”

Chilled, he asked, “How fast?”

“A hundred miles an hour. More.”

He whispered an imprecation. “You’re trying to kill yourself.” But that couldn’t be right. All she’d have to do was swerve off the road into a big Douglas fir and she’d be dead.

“I…” Once again, her gaze slid away. “Not exactly.”

He’d heard that before. “Then what?”

“I won’t choose to die, but—” She stopped, her lips pressed together.

“If it happens, you won’t mind,” Cole said slowly, scared shitless. Traveling at that high speed, it would take the tiniest of errors. An instant of distraction. An animal running across the road, a momentary loss of control.

“Only…sometimes.”

“I don’t get it.” But then he remembered the “walking dead” thing, when he’d feared she had a fatal disease. It sounded like she did, in a way. Mental illness? Or something more insidious? Now she looked at him as if she desperately needed that connection. “It’s…” She fidgeted for a moment. “I guess there’s no reason not to tell you.”

“There isn’t.” Some instinct had him reaching for her hand. He hadn’t held a woman’s hand in so long he couldn’t remember the last time, but this felt right. So right, he shoved the feeling to the back of his mind.

“I was a college professor. Small, liberal arts college in California. I taught history. Revolutionary War, Civil War and Reconstruction. Up through the nineteenth century.”

College professor. That meant graduate degrees. She was even further out of his league than he’d imagined. But since he’d never believed she’d see him as an equal, he ignored that as she kept talking.

“I coached women’s softball and volleyball, too. I’d played in high school and college.” Her eyes, big and haunted, searched his.

He nodded, although he still didn’t understand anything.

Seemingly reassured, she said, “We had an away game. I was driving. We always took this extralong van the college owned. Most of the team went, and my assistant coach. Charlotte was only twenty-three.”

Had. Was. The ominous verb tenses confirmed that this story wasn’t going anywhere good.

Cole’s fingers tightened on her cool, slender hand.

“I glanced in the rearview mirror because I thought one of the girls had taken off her seat belt. If I hadn’t, I might have been able to react in time. This huge semitruck roared across the median. I swerved and the van rocked and…and fought me. After that, all I remember is hearing screams.”

God. His throat tightened. “How many girls did you have with you?”

“Ten. And Charlotte.” Erin never looked away. “They died. All of them. Even the truck driver. Later, I was told the police think he had a heart attack.”

“Nobody to blame,” Cole murmured.

“Nobody?” She made an inarticulate sound. “Of course there is. I was the driver. Responsible.”

“You’re not the one who crossed the median.”

“I should have seen in time. Braked, sped up, something.”

“If you hadn’t looked in the mirror, you’d have had…what? A split second longer to react?”

“That might be all it would’ve taken,” she argued.

“I don’t believe that. Shit happens so fast when you’re driving. Even if you’d seen it sooner, how well could you have judged the truck’s speed? Or whether it would brake or swerve? And you can’t tell me that kind of van is very maneuverable. Had you ever had to change lanes fast or stop suddenly before?”