Page 31 of You, Only You

"Extra spicy," I said.

"For you or for me?"

"Both. You've been stealing my chili flakes for three days. I adjusted the order."

She blinked. "You noticed that?"

"I notice everything." The words came out before I could filter them, and they landed in the kitchen with more weightthan I'd intended. I busied myself with the containers. "It's a professional habit."

"Right," she said, and took the container I handed her. Our fingers touched on the transfer, and neither of us mentioned it, and we ate dinner at the kitchen island in a silence that was full of all the things we'd both overheard and chosen not to say.

That night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and thought about "I just wondered." About the specific bravery required to ask about someone who'd destroyed your life. About the gap between what Lindsey showed the world and what she carried when nobody was watching.

I thought about that gap until I fell asleep, and I did not think about why it mattered to me, because thinking about why would have required acknowledging something I wasn't ready to name.

By day five, the case had advanced significantly, but patterns weren't proof. They were circumstantial, deniable, the kind of thing expensive lawyers could explain away.

That morning, I argued with Lindsey over transportation logistics. She thought my suggestion of a dedicated driver was excessive. I thought her insistence on driving herself was reckless.

"You're being paranoid," she said, rolling her eyes in that particular way that made me want to continue the argument for another hour just to see what her face did next.

"I'm being strategic."

"You're being paranoid and calling it strategic, which is a neat trick."

"The threat level has escalated. A driver provides an additional layer of..."

"I've been driving myself since I was sixteen. I'm not going to start being chauffeured around because you have control issues."

"I don't have control issues."

She just looked at me.

"Fine. Drive yourself. But you check in when you arrive. Non-negotiable."

"That I can do."

She left, and I watched her car pull out of the garage, I got myself ready after a while and climbed into my car to drive there as well, I checked the app to make sure she was okay one las time before heading out.

Three hours later, I was three blocks from the courthouse, stopped at a red light, running through the list of documents she'd asked me to bring. Her car was in the next lane over, closer to the median. I tracked it automatically, the way I tracked everything: threat, position, distance, vector.

The light turned green.

Her car began to ease forward. And then the black SUV that had been idling to her left moved. Not forward. Sideways. A sharp, deliberate angle that wasn't acceleration.

It was intentional.

"No!"

The word ripped out of me as metal met metal. The sound was something I will never be able to describe and will never stop hearing: a shriek of tearing steel that I felt in my teeth, in my bones. Her sedan was so much smaller, so much lighter. The SUV shoved it sideways like a toy, and I watched her car spin toward the concrete guardrail, and my hands were off the steering wheel and on the door handle before the car stopped moving because my body had already decided what to do while my brain was still processing what had happened.

I don't remember putting my car in park. Don't remember opening the door. The blare of horns around me was noise from another dimension. I was running. That was all. Running.

Someone grabbed my arm and I threw them off without registering who they were or why they were touching me. Thedistance between my car and hers was forty feet. I covered it in seconds that lasted hours.

The driver's door was buckled, bent inward from the impact. I grabbed the handle and pulled. Nothing. The metal groaned but didn't give.

"Lindsey!" Her name came out of me in a voice I didn't recognize. Raw. Animal. The kind of sound you don't make unless something fundamental has gone wrong.