Part 1
The phone rang at 3:14 in the afternoon, a shrill sound that sliced through the quiet of the nursery.
Laura Thompson was on her knees on the floor, her eight-month belly resting heavily against her thighs as she folded a tiny yellow onesie so soft it looked like sunlight in fabric form. She smiled to herself as she imagined her son’s little face inside it, his hands opening and closing in the air, his whole world no bigger than her arms. Then the phone rang again.
She pushed herself upright with difficulty, one hand pressed to the small of her back, and answered on speaker without checking the number.
“Hello?”
The voice on the other end did not belong to anyone she knew.
It was male, deep, official, and so calm that the hairs on her arms rose instantly.
“Mrs. Thompson? Laura Thompson?”
“Yes.
This is Laura.”
“This is the State Patrol. Your husband, Michael Thompson, was involved in a car accident on I-5 heading toward Portland.”
The air left her lungs so fast it felt like being struck. The yellow onesie slipped from her fingers and fell soundlessly to the floor.
“An accident?
Is he okay?”
The pause that followed seemed endless.
“He’s alive, ma’am. He was taken to Mercy General Hospital. But he wasn’t alone.”
That last sentence remained in the air after the officer stopped speaking, heavy with a meaning she could not yet fully see.
He wasn’t alone.
Of course he wasn’t alone, she told herself at once.
He had probably been with a client. Maybe he had been closing a deal. Michael was a sales manager at a luxury car dealership outside Seattle, the kind of man who lived by quotas, commissions, late dinners, and endless phone calls.
Work always came first. Work explained everything.
“Who was he with?” she asked, though her voice had already gone thin.
“We don’t have that information in the report, ma’am. Only that the passenger was also transported.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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