Five Minutes Alone Read Free Page B

me?” she asks.
    “Emily isn’t here anymore,” I tell her.
    Her forehead creases even more. The room smells of coffee and toast, and I can hear the clock on the kitchen wall ticking, each second dragging out longer than it should, tick . . . tick . . . tick.
    “What do you mean? It’s . . .” she says, and glances at the microwave, “it’s seven forty. Where else would she . . . would she . . .”she says, slowing down now. The cracks are about to appear. I can see her making the connection. “Oh, I’m doing one of those dumb things again,” she says, and she turns away from me. She picks the knife back up and carries on buttering the toast. “I feel stupid,” she says, her voice shaking a little.
    “Bridget . . .”
    She puts down the knife and carries the toast over to the table. She sits down. “She won’t even be awake for another hour. She’s never up before eight during school holidays. I don’t know why I thought I would make her breakfast so early. I just wish . . . I just wish this’d stop happening, it’s like these stupid black spots in my memory are always shifting around.”
    “Bridget,” I say, and I sit down beside her and take her hands. I hold them tight. “Emily isn’t here because Emily died. She died three years ago in the same accident that hurt you.”
    Her face tightens and she tries to pull her hands out of mine, but I keep hold of them. “That’s not even funny,” she says. “Why would you be so cruel? Why would—”
    “Bridget—”
    “Why would you say such a thing, Theodore?” she asks.
    “Babe—”
    “Why?” she asks, and she’s starting to cry, the cracks are getting bigger. I pull her in closer to me. “Why,” she says, and she starts sobbing, and she wraps her arms around my neck and sobs into me. “I miss her,” she says, her tears running down my neck and soaking the top of my shirt. “I miss her so much.”
    “I know you do,” I tell her. “I miss her too. I’m so sorry.”
    “It was my fault,” she says. “I shouldn’t have taken her, we should have stayed home, we should—”
    “It wasn’t your fault.”
    “I don’t remember any of it,” she says, and she never will. All she remembers is what we’ve told her, that a drunk driver was going through a parking lot at a shopping mall at the same time Emily and my wife were there. A drunk driver who had already been caught multiple times, who’d lost his license and paid numerousfines, a drunk driver that the court system kept putting back onto the street, like handing a loaded gun to a gangbanger and sending him on his merry way. That drunk driver’s name was Quentin James, and he merryed his way directly into my wife and daughter.
    She knows the man who did it disappeared, but she doesn’t know I was the reason why. I dragged him out into the woods. I told her what I had done while she was in her vegetative state. I’d always told her about my days. I’d confessed my sins to her. But not now.
    I hold her, and I’m still holding her when I hear a car pull up outside. Kent gives a brief toot. “I can stay,” I tell her.
    “No,” she says. “I’m okay. I promise.”
    “I’m so sorry,” I tell her.
    “It’s not your fault,” she says, but somehow it feels like it is. I should have been able to protect my family. “I’ll be okay. You go and save the world, Teddy,” she says, and she’s the only person ever to have called me that. Not even my mom. “Go out there and stop other girls like Emily from being hurt.”
    I kiss her good-bye and she walks me to the door. She waves at Detective Kent because now she remembers her, and Kent waves back.
    “You look like hell,” Kent says when I get into the car.
    “Tough morning.”
    “It’s about to get tougher,” she says, and she puts the car into gear and Bridget is still waving at us as we pull away from the house.

CHAPTER THREE
    The victim isn’t in a dozen pieces, not quite, but it’s close