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Hayes gave me a look filled with sympathy, and I was already shaking my head when Ty appeared beside me. “He didn’t make it out of the infield, Tally. They worked on him all the way to the hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival.”
I shook my head furiously. Ty was wrong. He was wrong. “No.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. It was a freak accident. They think a piece of debris came through the window at a high enough speed and hit between his Hutchins and his helmet, getting the jugular. He lost a lot of blood before they could get the fire under control.” He swallowed hard. “I’m so sorry.”
My knees gave way, shock sending me to the ground. My head battled with my heart, like that traitorous bitch wanted to scream I told you so to the aggressively beating organ in my chest. This sport had fatalities. We knew every time we drove out onto the track that we might not come back.
I’d known that Buck was a driver—a wild and aggressive one at that—before I started dating him. I should have been at least a little bit prepared for this.
But my heart screamed and screamed at the loss of what could have been, even if I did just sob silently with my head hanging, defeated. Arms picked me up, shuffling me out of view of the crowd and the garage crew.
I looked up at Hayes, and something about the concern on his face made me pull myself together. I cloaked myself in numbness. Shook away the pain in my chest, and replaced it with a black abyss of nothingness.
Wiggling out of his arms, I stood on my feet. “I’m okay,” I said weakly.
Hayes shook his head. “No, you’re not.”
I swallowed hard as the tears threatened to well in my eyes once more. He was right; I wasn’t. “I’m okay enough to get out of here.”
Sam Ryker appeared in the doorway of the garage we were standing in. His face was a mask of neutrality, though I could see regret in his eyes. “Tally, can we talk?”
I knew, deep down in my bones, I wasn’t going to like what he had to say.
ONE
TALLY
I was beginning to really relate to those old-style country and western singers who sang mournfully about how Lady Luck had abandoned them, then kicked them in the balls while stealing their dog.
Luck hadn’t stolen my dog, but it had killed my boyfriend. Luck hadn’t kicked me in the balls, but it had gotten me fired and black-listed from the profession I loved, all because some grieving father decided it was my fault his son crashed and veered into the path of flying debris.
Brick Willtot had sunk my career, because he was convinced that I was bad luck. That Buck had been thinking about me when he’d hit the wall that sent him careening into a bunch of other cars, before flipping end over end. That it was my fault his own mechanics hadn’t secured down the piece of framing that pierced his jugular.
It was “just bad luck,” as the commentators kept saying over and over. A freak accident. A one-off in the history of the sport.
I’d made myself watch the accident over and over on Youtube. The sports broadcasters had stopped showing the footage out of respect for the family, but people on the internet had no respect. So I forced myself to sit there, rewatching the crash for hours to figure out who was really to blame. But no one had fucked up but Buck himself, and there was no one to blame but the sport of motor racing.
Slumping back against the sagging couch in my studio apartment, I closed my eyes against the memories of that moment. It had been six months ago, and as luck would have it, I now had bigger fucking problems.
Problem number one: I had no money whatsoever. Apparently, Brick Willtot had teabagged his giant fucking brass balls into the mouths of all the other teams, so no one would pick me up after Ryclo dropped me. Worse than that, I couldn’t get a job anywhere in NASCAR.
Right now, I was waitressing at a diner down the street, but I wouldn’t even be able to do that for much longer. I only had one real solution; it was dangerous as fuck, but the payoff would be worth it.
I flicked through my phone to find the number of Willy Love. His real name was William, but his parents had called him Willy, and it kind of stuck. Our parents had been best friends, so we’d grown up together, and while I pursued racing, he’d gone and gotten a great job as an investment banker. Where was the thrill in investment banking?
Anyway, he was the closest thing I had to a family now, though I hadn’t spoken to him in six months, so I wasn’t exactly sure how this would go. As the phone rang, I switched it to speakerphone, putting it carefully down on the coffee table like it was an explosive device.
“Hello?”
“Willy? It’s Tally.”
“Tally? Jesus fucking Christ, it’s good to hear from you. I was worried. Colin! It’s Tally.”
While I’d been pursuing grease monkeys with dirty fingernails and aw-shucks smiles, Willy had come out as gay to his parents and presented Colin, a guy so unproblematic and sweet, Willy’s parents couldn’t help but accept him. I could hear Colin thanking cheese and RuPaul in the background. He had his own deities.
“Where the hell have you been, Tally? We’ve been worried sick. You just fell off the face of the earth.”
I felt kind of bad, but I hadn’t been in a fit state to talk to anyone without screaming in rage, and I wouldn’t run the risk of ostracizing Willy and Colin. They were the last two people on the earth who’d care if I disappeared completely.
