Spencer POV
I almost took the highway.
I should have taken the highway. The highway was faster, better lit, and didn't require the specific kind of attention that the mountain roads demanded in rain like this. But I'd driven the highway home four hundred times and my brain had started finishing the route without me, leaving my conscious mind alone in the dark with a sixteen-year-old boy's chart and the particular sound a waiting room makes when everything has already gone wrong.
The mountain road required both hands and focus. That was the only reason I took it.
Ten Years in emergency medicine and I still hasn't found the off switch. Sage said I was married to the Job, usually with the specific energy of someone who had decided your life was her personal renovation project. She wasn't wrong, she was almost never wrong, which was its own kind of exhausting.
But saving lives was clean and straightforward. You either did it or you didn't, and the options were medical, not emotional and I was good with medical options in a way I had proven expensively, in the form of divorce papers three years ago that I was not good with emotional ones.
Ella had said "you're more present with strangers dying than you are with me."
And I hadn't argue, that had been the problem.
I drove carefully, with both hands, full attention on the wet road ahead. Rain like this turned mountain curves into dangerous suggestions. I'd seen what happened when people forgot that, I'd treated what happened when people forgot that, and I had no interest in becoming my own patient.
The headlights appeared lower on the road, maybe two curves ahead. It was a smaller car, moving faster than the conditions needed, I eased off the accelerator and watched. I felt something in my chest, the same thing I felt whenever things were about to go sideways.
I'd learned to trust that feeling. Then I saw the second vehicle.
It had been sitting on the roadside, and it pulled out behind the smaller car with a purpose that had nothing casual in it. It closed the distance too fast. My foot was already coming off the accelerator when it hit her.
It accelerated and made contact, full deliberate force into her rear bumper, and I said something out loud in my empty car that I will not repeat.
The smaller car fishtailed and caught itself. The second hit came at an angle, harder, more calculated, and this time the guardrail met the car at the weak join and gave like it was made of something cheaper than metal, and then the car was gone, over the edge, into the dark below, and I was already braking, already pulling over, already out of the car before I'd made any decision about any of it.
I reached for my phone and emergency kit.i called 911 while I ran the embankment, gave my location and what I'd seen, the deliberate impact, hit and run, vehicle heading back toward the city and the operator told me to wait for emergency services. I told her I was an ER doctor and kept moving.
The embankment was steep and wet and didn't care. I went down hard on my hands twice, opened my palm on something sharp and kept going. The car had hit the river forty feet below, I could see the shape of it, headlights still cutting weakly through the murk before the water claimed them entirely. It was sinking and inside, barely visible through the fractured windshield was movement.
I didn't think about the temperature when I hit the water, it would've made me slower.
The cold went straight through the skin and muscle and organs. I surfaced, found the car and swam against the current with everything I had left after a fourteen-hour shift, which turned out to be barely enough.
The driver's side was folded inward at an angle that wasn't opening for anyone. I could see her through the intact window, she was young, with brunette hair suspended in the water filing the cabin, she had a head wound at her left temple already bleeding pink into the food. Her eyes were half-open. The water was at her neck.
I found a rock and turned my face away and put my elbow through the window with everything I had. The glass gave way. I reached in, ignored the edges, found the seatbelt release, felt it click and pulled her through with controlled urgency.
She wasn't breathing when I got her to the bank. I began CPR, thirty compressions, I'd done this enough times that my body knew the sequence the way it knew how to walk.
She coughed. Water came out of her and she gasped like her body had remembered at the last possible second that it wasn't done yet. I kept my hands on her shoulder and checked her pulse, she was alive.
I heard sirens in the distance. I looked up at the road, the vehicle that hit her was gone, and drove away.
I looked back down at the woman breathing shallowly in the wet scrub beside me.
St. Benedicts was twelve minutes from here, if she was in a hospital database, she was findable.
If she was findable, whoever had just driven away at a measured, unbothered speed would find her.
My phone buzzed, it was Sage's name on the screen because of course it was, because Sage called at the exact wrong moment.
I declined it and then picked the woman up, got her weight distributed across my arms, and carried her toward my car.
My private clinic was twenty minutes east. Off-system, off-record, staffed tonight by a nurse I trusted with my own life because I'd had occasion to test that trust and she hadn't failed it. The woman in my arms was breathing, she had a head wound and probable internal bruising and a body temperature that needed addressing in the next thirty minutes.
She also had someone who had tried to kill her tonight and driven away like they intended to try again.
The ambulance could have the accident report. They could have the guardrail and the tire marks and the rain-soaked embankment.
She was coming with me.
