Page 79 of Chasing the Other Woman

“You would have, once.”

“I’m trying not to be that man anymore.”

Her throat moves, and she looks away first. “Road jogs right in half a mile. Watch the ditch.”

“I've got it.”

She keeps her eyes fixed on the horizon, but the tension in her jaw eases just a fraction. For half a second, I'm twenty-six in a beat-up blue truck, broke as hell, with the smartest woman I know sitting beside me while the sky comes apart.

Then the radio crackles hard.

“Lead, we’re getting debris crossing behind you,” one of the camera guys says. “Small stuff. Sheet metal, branches.”

Sam checks the radar, her face going still.

“What do you see?” I ask.

“That circulation’s tightening faster than it should.” She pinches the image wider. “Brooks.”

The way she says my name turns my blood cold. Ahead, rain drops like a curtain across the road, cutting visibility in half in the space of a breath.

“Tell me,” I say.

“Our east option may already be compromised.”

I glance at the road grid mounted near the dash. “We’ve got another mile.”

“We may not have another mile.”

A hard gust slams into the truck. The tires slip, catch, and slip again. Sam braces one hand against the dash, and for one terrible second, her palm there sends me spiraling backward.

Road slick with red mud. Metal screaming. Sam’s hand pressed to her belly. Blood on leather.

My lungs lock up.

“Brooks.”

Her voice is right beside me. Not a memory. Not fluorescent hospital light. Not the back seat of Hershel’s truck. Here.

I force air in through my nose. Ozone and charged dust blow through the cracked window, cold against the heat in my throat. “I’m here.”

She watches me for a split second. No pity, and no softening into panic because I'm rattled. Just Sam, sitting where she always should've been, trusting me to stay with her.

Then she points through the windshield. “Left edge of the rain shaft. See the motion?”

I see it. “Damn it.”

The planned road disappears into a smear of water and dust ahead of us. Debris skitters across the gravel, fast and erratic. A road sign, or what's left of one, cartwheels through the ditch and slaps against a fence post.

The radio spits static.

“Hershel,” I call. “Status.”

Nothing but wind.

“Hershel, copy?”

A broken burst of sound comes back, then cuts out completely.