Читать книгу Everything to Lose - Andrew Gross, Andrew Gross - Страница 17

The night was clear, the roads mostly empty. Every stop sign, I told myself I could always turn around. You don’t have to do this, Hil. There has to be some other plan.

I never turned.

On the Bedford–Greenwich road, the landmarks grew familiar. A stone barn I’d passed ten days before. The apple and vegetable farm. I remembered following that Honda, my life in a shambles, watching him swerve, seeing him spin off the road. I slowed, passing a bend in the road that looked familiar. Was it here? That curve? Or farther along?

The police tape was gone now. Everything looked back to normal.

It wasn’t until I passed the election poster that I realized I’d driven right by.

I turned at the first chance about a quarter mile past it and headed back around. There was a hole in the dense brush about the width of a car where Kelty’s car had gone through. I drove on about a hundred yards and found a turnoff with a chain blocking the drive and a NO ACCESS sign. Maybe for a property someone was hoping to develop.

I pulled my Acura in maybe twenty yards from the road. There was a long time between cars going by. I turned off the engine. I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to use a penny of it for my own needs. Only for Brandon. And keeping a roof over our heads.

For a while I just sat there, telling myself that there was this one last chance to drive away. I looked at my face in the mirror. It wasn’t my current face I saw, but strangely, the eyes of a child. Remembering the uncertainty I’d gone through as a nine-year-old, everything I loved and counted on ripped away in an instant.

It had taken me years to learn to trust life again.

I wouldn’t let that happen to my son.

I took my flashlight, and this time my face was filled with resolve.

Welcome to the other side of the road.