LITMIR.BIZ

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the wheel, her knuckles blanched white as bleached bones, her head dull and thundering.

      “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.”

      She couldn’t panic.

      Wouldn’t.

      The vision was nothing. Nothing!

      But her insides were trembling and she knew that she had to leave, to find her way home, and fast. That was it. She would throw some water over her face, figure out what she was going to do, how she would care for the baby, if she would ever tell Hudson, what she would tell her parents…

      Gingerly she stepped on the gas.

      The road was empty and she could have sworn that the harsh winds that had just been battering the car had died. No birds called, no insects hummed, no sounds of distant traffic reached her ears. Even the car’s engine was muted. Still.

      And then she heard it.

      An engine.

      Loud.

      Rumbling.

      A truck of some sort, traveling fast, coming from around the bend behind her. She didn’t dare accelerate onto the pavement until it passed. And yet…

      Her heart was a tattoo, her palms wet. Something was wrong. Seriously wrong!

      It’s the vision. It’s got you all hyped up. That’s all.

      The engine roared more loudly.

      And then a dark pickup careened around the corner at breakneck speed, its wheels nearly coming off the pavement.

      “No!” she cried as the driver apparently lost control.

      In a split second, the truck bore down on her, its huge grate magnified in her mirror.

      She stepped on the gas, but it was too late.

      The truck careened off the pavement.

      She screamed. The pickup slammed into her car, nearly broadside, crumpling the back end and door of the Toyota. With a horrible shriek, the metal wrenched. Glass shattered. The driver’s door was wrenched from its hinges as the car folded. Pain screamed through her body as she saw the truck tear away, hardly slowing at all. The vision returned…a dark angry sea, a large looming form, and a deadly threat as she went in and out of consciousness.

      There had been policemen and EMTs and gawkers as the car had been opened with the Jaws of Life and she’d been extracted from the wreckage. People had shouted or whispered or talked into walkie-talkies, but it was all a blur as she was carried into a waiting ambulance.

      Please let me keep my baby, she prayed to the ceiling of the ambulance as the siren screamed, resounding. Please. Please!

      She’d woken up in the hospital, her parents worn and raw, her mother’s eyes red-rimmed and teary as she sat in a bedside chair, a wadded tissue in her fingers. Her father, appearing to have aged a decade in the past ten hours, stood near his wife’s chair, a big steadying hand on Barbara’s shoulders.

      “The baby?” she asked in a voice that sounded a million miles away. She felt empty inside, oddly at war with her own body as an IV leaked fluids into her wrist, and outside the private room, through a door slightly ajar, she saw a large, curved desk—the nurses’ station.

      Her parents had looked at her and shaken their heads. Tears leaked from her mother’s eyes and her father’s lips pressed flat together.

      Her prayers had gone unanswered and a somber-faced doctor only a few years older than she had explained that the force of the accident had caused her placenta to rupture. The baby could not be saved and Becca was “lucky” to have only sustained a broken clavicle, bruised ribs, and facial contusions from the flying glass.

      Lucky? When my baby died?

      Despair coiled over her heart. Becca’s parents took care of their distraught daughter, who refused to tell them the baby’s father’s name, though surely they could have guessed. She’d never introduced Hudson as her “boyfriend,” had usually gone out with a crowd that included several boys, as far as her mother and father were concerned, but surely they could guess.

      They just never asked after the first initial weeks.

      Her mother confided in her months later that “it really didn’t matter” who the boy was. Obviously Becca didn’t care enough about him to even give him a name or tell him about his child.

      Becca had winced inside but held her ground, never once mentioning Hudson Walker. She recovered slowly, consumed with the worry that the accident might cause her to never be able to have children. Her collarbone finally mended, her ribs and face healed. She was assured that she was fine. That what had happened was just an unfortunate and tragic accident. There was no reason that she couldn’t have other children.

      The police never located the driver of the truck, and as Becca had no image of the person behind the wheel, and no license number, and no local body shops had reported a truck coming in with the kind of damage it should have sustained in the accident, no citations were issued.

      Never admitting to her “vision,” Becca went back to school winter term and tried to put the pain of losing her baby behind her. Hudson didn’t call, nor did she phone him. She thought about it, but told herself to let the past die. A few months later she moved into an apartment and continued her job in the law firm, never intending to make it a career. But time passed and Ben came to work at the firm and…and it felt like the years had suddenly telescoped, as if it could still be that fall when she and Hudson broke up and the automobile accident robbed her of her child.

      She’d blocked most of the past. Blocked it on purpose. She’d never told Hudson about the pregnancy. Never really had a chance to toil over whether she should or shouldn’t before it was over. She’d forced herself to look forward, not back.

      Eventually, she’d married Benjamin Sutcliff. They’d dated, grown close, married, and she’d hoped for a family, that, as it turned out, he didn’t want. But that section of her life was over, too.

      And now this part of her past, the part with Hudson and Jessie, the part that she’d steadfastly buried and covered with concrete, had suddenly come to life, broken through all of her careful barricades and reared its painful head.

      Now, unable to sleep, she shoved her hair from her eyes and snapped on the bedside light. She couldn’t, wouldn’t dwell on the past. If it took every ounce of grit she had, she wasn’t about to travel down the thorny path that was her own life’s history. No, damn it, she was going to concentrate on her life as it was. As it had become. Reality. She was a widow. An almost divorcée. After Ben’s rejection, she’d spent the rest of last year and the beginning of this one in a strange exercise of forced forward motion. One foot in front of the other. Keep going. Push on. Fight your way through and hope to come out the other side stronger, wiser, and maybe even better off.

      It had been a tough fight. Her secretarial work at Bennett, Bretherton, and Pfeiffer had tapered off with the decline of the law firm’s clients—an aspect of a decline in health of one of the senior partners and disinterest in the others. Now Becca worked mostly from home, using a fax machine to receive her eldest boss’s hand-scratched notes, or using e-mail and the Internet to download drafts of contracts, legal notes, letters, and memoranda before rewriting, polishing, and sending the finished product back via the Internet. It was a disembodied way to work, and there wasn’t really enough of it to sustain her much longer. The firm was tightening up—keeping their information “in-house” due to confidentiality issues.

      Becca was at a crossroads. Choices were going to have to be made. Maybe her earlier vision of Jessie was a result of the low-grade stress she wasn’t acknowledging. Or maybe it was that she was a weirdo and just couldn’t admit it.

      “Damn it all to hell,” she said, flipping off the light and yanking the covers to her neck.

      Sighing, Ringo stretched his legs and pushed against her with his paws.

      And beneath everything she’d thought

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