LITMIR.BIZ

      To Steve, for always being at my back. To Karen Whiddon and Debby Giusti, for reading so much. To Melinda Curtis and Anna J. Stewart for spending this holiday with me, and to Victoria Curran and Dana Grimaldi for working so hard to make this a Christmas Gift.

CHAPTER ONE

      SNOWFLAKES HIT THE windshield and splayed into star shapes while Bing Crosby crooned his dreams of a white Christmas. Sophie Palmer tried to sing along, but her mind was already racing up the icy interstate to Christmas Town, Maine, where the father of her unborn child now lived.

      That Charlie Brown Christmas song came next, with talk of happiness and cheer and families drawing near. Sophie stared at the road, as frozen as the world she was driving into. The closer to Christmas Town she got, the more humiliated she felt.

      But she wasn’t going to ask Jack Banning to love her again. He’d rejected her and their child—love wasn’t a possibility.

      She dropped one hand to her slightly rounded belly. “You deserve better. You deserve the chance to have a father, if he can remember he’s a decent man.”

      Overhead, a sign warned that the exit for Christmas Town was a quarter mile ahead. Time to embark on possibly the most foolish fool’s errand of all time.

      She veered off at the exit, pausing to yield, and then turned onto a two-lane road bounded by primeval forest.

      Another car was coming toward her, but it shimmied in its lane, as if the driver was asleep. Sophie slid her foot to the brake and lowered her speed, edging to the right, but the other car seemed to follow. It crossed the line. And sped up.

      Sophie slapped at the steering wheel to find the horn. She hugged the edge of the road, screaming at the oncoming driver as she tried to stay out of the ditch.

      Time yawned as the driver’s face came into focus. A young woman—looking up from her phone. Her face screwed up in horror, and Sophie realized she would see that woman’s expression in nightmares for the rest of her life.

      The little blue car swung away, rocking, but then skidded back as the driver tried to steady it.

      In the time it took to gasp, Sophie hoped they would have a near miss. Then the back of the girl’s car smacked the front of hers, and they spun away from each other.

      That quickly, it was over, and Sophie found herself staring up at snow-covered trees. While the clash of metal echoed in her ears, Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Song” made the silence surreal. Sophie whipped off her seat belt and splayed her hands across her stomach.

      Nothing. She felt nothing.

      At eighteen weeks, she might not. The baby was small. She still had plenty of cushion. Her unborn daughter might be okay. Everything might be okay.

      Sophie looked back at the other car.

      Everything was not okay.

      The girl’s vehicle was on its side in a spray of snow. The teen lay on her back, spilled onto the road, denim-covered legs out straight, hair splayed across the car’s skid marks.

      Sophie tried to open her door, but it wouldn’t budge. She shoved as hard as she could and then tried the other side, which also refused to open.

      The window.

      She tugged at the bottom of her coat until she could pull it over her head, and then leaned against the console and kicked the driver’s window with all her strength. Two kicks and it crashed through, hanging on to the door by a corner, all in one jagged-edged piece.

      Sophie slithered through, careful to avoid the glass, and hit the ground, taking her weight on her hands. Pain shot through her wrists to her fingers and up her arms. Ignoring it, she leaned back inside for her phone, tucked away in the console.

      Punching 911, she ran the thirty-forty steps to kneel beside the young woman.

      “Christmas County Emergency Services. How may I—”

      “I’m putting you on speaker.” Sophie tossed her coat over the girl’s torso. “I’ve just been in a car accident. We’re east of the Christmas Town exit, not even a mile. I have a female in her late teens, ejected from her vehicle, probable broken arm. Unconscious. Probable broken right leg. She’s got a gash on the head, just beneath her temple. Thready pulse.”

      “What’s your name, ma’am?”

      “Sophie Palmer. I’m easing her arm out from under her body—”

      “Don’t move her, Sophie.”

      “I’m an E.R. trauma nurse. I think she’s lacerated an artery.” Sophie recognized her own growing shock in the wave of nausea that surged through her as she assessed the gaping wound on the young woman’s upper arm. She whipped off her cotton shirt and tore it with adrenaline-fueled strength. “I’m applying a tourniquet,” she said, shivering in her tank top.

      “We’re sending a helicopter,” the operator said. “Is she breathing?”

      “Yes. Low and fast.” Drops of blood had appeared on the teen’s chin. “She has a— Oh.” It wasn’t the girl’s blood. Sophie didn’t dare stop winding the shirt to check her own injury.

      No pain in her abdomen. My baby girl. Eighteen weeks. Plenty of cushion.

      “Are you hurt?”

      “Some pain in my wrists, and I have a laceration somewhere on my head or face. I’m eighteen weeks pregnant, but I don’t think I’m bleeding, and I have no abdominal pain. Please hurry.”

      “They’re lifting off. Shouldn’t be more than five minutes.”

      The girl struggled as if she were trying to breathe, and then—nothing. Sophie felt for a pulse with shaking fingers. “She’s stopped breathing. I’m starting CPR.”

      She began compressions, while her wrists screamed for her to stop. The operator’s voice went on in the background, but Sophie barely heard.

      This girl had left some other mom’s home this morning, with her whole life just waiting to be lived. She’d be going back if sheer force could make her breathe again.

      Tears leaked from Sophie’s eyes.

      A new sound made her want to look up. The whir of blades. So many times Sophie had waited on the landing pad in Boston, but today would be different. Her own baby and this girl were both going to live.

      Chaos descended. The helicopter landed close enough to lift her hair and the teen’s. Papers fluttered past. One, titled “Biology,” imprinted itself on Sophie’s eyes. The girl’s Christmas break assignment.

      Feet appeared around them. One crushed her phone on the road. A pair of legs in dark blue uniform pants eased her out of the way.

      Someone else helped her stand, but she felt as fluid as water. The EMT supported her when she began slipping back to the ground.

      “Are you in pain?” He looked younger than the girl she’d been helping.

      “A little in my wrists but I don’t think they’re even sprained.”

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