Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 72196 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 289(@250wpm)___ 241(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72196 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 289(@250wpm)___ 241(@300wpm)
“The girl wasn’t in a restraint. They found her on the side of the road…”
The side of the road.
“The woman was restrained. The police have just arrived,” he continued. “My number is…” his voice trailed off as static started to interfere.
“Travis,” I mewled. “Alex.”
He was in front of me seconds later.
“What happened?”
The line went dead.
“There was an accident.”
***
I’d never been so scared in my life.
We made it to the scene in less than ten minutes after Michael and Travis had left, and what I arrived to was utter chaos.
There were emergency crews everywhere.
Two cars were on their sides less than ten feet from each other. Smoke filled the air from both cars. The smell of burnt rubber and something I couldn’t decipher were assaulting my nostrils, and the sound of a man yelling as well as a heated engine ticking could be heard over the rest of the noise.
It didn’t take me long to locate Travis.
He was being pushed back by a burly police officer on his front side, and Michael on his back. But he wasn’t having any of it. He was frantic to get to the other side of what I now realized was Allegra’s car.
There were large emergency floodlights erected on all sides of the accident scene, but most of the chaos seemed to be surrounding where Travis was trying to go.
And I knew that was where Alex was.
My heart was literally ripping to shreds.
“This way,” I told Baylor.
Baylor was one step ahead of me.
When Travis had left, he’d made me wait for Baylor to get me before I left. It’d been the worst ten minutes of my life.
But now we were there, I could tell that this was very bad.
The moment I got up to Travis’ side, I saw the tiny, sequined slip on shoes that I’d bought Alex a few weeks before lying precariously on the edge of the asphalt. One was flipped on its side, and the other was straddling the white line that signaled the end of the pavement.
And just a few feet from those shoes were tiny little feet.
My heart lurched.
“Let me go,” Travis shoved at the police officer again. “I’m not kidding, Andi. I need to…”
“You need to back off. You need to let them work. You need to calm yourself down so we can get this done without us having to worry about you instead of her.”
That got him calmed down faster than anything else could, knowing that the attention he was garnering from the emergency services crew was actually taking away from them taking care of his little girl.
“All right,” he pushed away and immediately placed both hands onto his forehead. “Fuck.”
I pushed past Travis, and was stopped by the same cop that had pushed him back. “I’m a nurse,” I informed him.
He waved me past him, and I spared one look over my shoulder at Travis before I hurried past and stopped next to one of the medics that was stabilizing Alex for transport.
I tried not to look at her bloodied clothing or the makeshift cast around her arm that clearly indicated she had a broken bone. Nor did I pay attention to the way that her eyes were closed tightly, showing me that she was conscious, but in pain.
The C-spine on her neck, holding her head immobile, was making my hands itch to pull her into my arms and whisper to her that it’d be okay. I wanted to cradle her like the baby she was. I wanted to wipe that blood from her nose and kiss it all better.
But I did none of those things.
“I’m a nurse,” I told the medic. “Is there anything I can do?”
He looked at me, and shook his head.
“Life Flight is ten minutes out,” he said. “Closest hospital that’s not on divert is Children’s in Benton, Louisiana.”
I nodded, knowing what divert was, and how a lot of the area hospitals were having to go on that due to a high volume of patients lately. When ICU was full, they were practically forced to put the rest of the hospital on lockdown to incoming patients, and the two closest hospitals that were equipped to take a patient in need of the ICU—which was obvious Alex was—had been extremely overwhelmed. Not to mention they were short staffed on top of that.
Children’s in Benton was a good choice, if not a little far.
But if that was what had to happen to make sure that Alex had the best care, then that was what we’d do.
And that was what we did.
“Who are you to the little girl?” the medic I’d spoken to minutes before on the side of the road asked as we walked Alex to the waiting helicopter.
“Stepmother,” I told him.
It was partially true.
And the moment that I’d come on scene and gotten past the cops that were guarding Alex like a couple of linebackers protecting their quarterback, Travis had seemed to calm even more.