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She ignored me. She was liking this road. I was too. Well, kind of. It was a little steep for me, but that’s what you got when you were living in the Smoky Mountains. I looked behind me again, making sure I wasn’t holding anyone up. That was one of my biggest fears. The last thing I needed was someone tailgating me on this narrow two-lane highway.

Nope. Nothing.

I turned up the radio, and when Bonnie Raitt’s song, “Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About” came on, I turned it up real loud. That’s what Kai and I had been doing in Jasper Creek for the last three weeks. People were really talking about us.

I actually saw a woman with purple hair point at me. Point. With her finger. Then she said to the lady she was standing next to in the post office line that I had been kissing Grady Beaumont on his front porch.

“Florence, get your story straight. She wasn’t kissing Grady. Grady is Beau, and he’s still not home from the service. She was kissing Brady.” That came from the man behind the post office counter.

Normally I would have wanted the floor to swallow me up, but I was too amazed by all their knowledge.

“Brady doesn’t like to be called Brady,” the woman at the front of the line said. “He calls hisself, Kai. What kind of name is Kai, anyway?”

The lady behind me tapped me on the shoulder. “Honey, is he going to be staying in town, or is he going back to where he came from?”

“I don’t know.” I answered.

“That’s a shame,” she said. “Try to get him to stay.”

Then everyone chimed in about how sad they would be to see Brady leave.

Yep, we were definitely giving the town something to talk about. I started singing along with Bonnie.

Woof!

Woof!

Why was⁠—

Wham!

Something hit me from behind hard enough that I jolted forward against my seatbelt then whipped backwards.

Owwww!

God, that hurt. I tried to get my shit together, but the pain in my head and neck was shorting out my brain. My rearview mirror showed me a huge truck falling behind me as I sped forward.

Wait!

“Chaos!”

Nothing.

“Chaos! Answer me!”

I heard her whining. I couldn’t see her on the seat, so I figured she must be on the floor. She sounded pitiful, but at least I knew she was alive.

“Thank you, Jesus.”

But we had a bigger problem. I was now in the oncoming traffic lane and if I didn’t do something about it, we were both goners. At least we were on a stretch of straight road but that was going to change a quarter-mile ahead, where the road curved to the right around the rock-wall side of the mountain. I jerked the wheel to put us back into the correct lane just as a car appeared around the sharp curve. The driver honked and flashed their headlights at me as they passed. I hit the brake to slow down for the curve and still took it too fast when⁠—

Crunch!

Something hit us again from behind after we cleared the curve. Not as hard this time, thank God. My foot was on the brake but I was picking up speed. That made no sense.

What the hell?

Chaos kept whining from the back seat, terrified or possibly hurt. I looked in the rearview mirror to see what had hit me. It took a moment to decipher what I was seeing, because it looked like just a big slab of black with a shiny grill. I blinked. Then blinked again. It was the truck that had been behind me earlier, hitting me a second time. Not a semi, more like a Ford One Thousand or something. It was right against my back bumper, pushing me.