She glanced at the handbag sitting on the passenger seat. Poking out of the top was a worn blue teddy bear with one eye and bald ears where the fluff had been loved off. The backs of her eyes burned, but she refused to blink, knowing that any moisture leaking over her lashes would feel like acid. The pummelling on the roof of the car magnified, filling her ears and pulling the world away from her down a long, invisible tunnel.
Not now. Today of all days I need to keep it together.
She forced herself to sit upright in the driver’s seat and stared blindly into the blurry grey scenery beyond the windscreen, then turned the key in the ignition. The car rumbled grudgingly to life, coughed once, and promptly stalled.
Still she didn’t blink, just held her breath for a few seconds, then reached out to stroke the dashboard.
Come on, girl! Don’t let me down now.
She pumped the gas a few times and tried again, and when the engine rewarded her with an uneven purr, she released her breath and put the car into gear. She pulled away slowly, rumbling down the country lane, and didn’t allow herself the luxury of looking back.
An hour later she was sitting behind a caravan on the motorway. It was only going at about fifty, but she made no attempt to pass it. This speed was fine, thank you very much. Driving wasn’t her favourite occupation these days, and she hadn’t been on a motorway in a long time. She distracted herself from the haulage trucks passing her at insane speeds with thoughts of fresh starts and new jobs.
Everyone had been so happy when she’d come out of hospital after the accident, sure she was going to be ‘back to normal’ in no time. And after a year, when she’d finally moved out of her parents’ house and back into the cottage, her family and friends had breathed a collective sigh of relief.
That was it. Everything done and dusted. Ellie is all better and we can stop worrying now.
But Ellie wasn’t all better. Her hair might have grown again and covered the uneven scars on her skull, she might even talk and walk the same, but nothing, nothing, would ever be the same again. Underneath the ‘normal’ surface she was fundamentally different and always would be.
She focused on the droplets of rain collecting on the windscreen.
Water. That was all those tiny splashes were. Almost nothing, really. So how could something so inconsequential alter the course of three lives so totally, so drastically? She nudged the lever next to the steering wheel again and the specks of water vanished in a flurry of motion.
Thankfully, within a few minutes the rain had stopped completely and she was able to slow the squeaking wipers to a halt. Warm afternoon light cut clean paths through the clouds. Her shoulder blades eased back into their normal position and she realised she’d been clenching her teeth from the moment she’d put her foot on the accelerator. She made a conscious effort to relax her jaw and stretched her fingers. The knuckles creaked, stiff from gripping the steering wheel just a little too tightly.
A big blue sign was up ahead and she read it carefully.
Junction Eight. Two more to go.
She’d promised herself that she would not zone out and sail past the turn-off. Getting lost was not an option today.
The caravan in front slowed until it was practically crawling along. Ellie glanced in her wing mirror. She could overtake it if she wanted to. The adjacent lane was almost clear. Still, it took her five minutes and a stiff lecture before she signalled and pulled out.
She was still concentrating on remembering to exit at Junction Ten, visualising the number, burning it onto her short-term memory, when a prolonged horn blast startled her. A car loomed large in her rear-view mirror. It inched closer, until their bumpers were almost touching, its engine snarling. Ellie was almost frightened enough to speed up to give herself breathing room. Almost.
Flustered, she grabbed at the levers round the steering wheel for the indicator, only to discover she’d turned the fog light on instead. She fought to keep her breathing calm, yanked at the correct lever and pulled into the inside lane. What she now realised was a sleek Porsche zoomed past in a bright red blur.
A sigh of relief was halfway across her lips when the same car swerved in front of her. She stamped on the brake and glared at the disappearing number plate, retaliating by pressing her thumb on the horn for a good five seconds, even though the lunatic driver was now a speck in the distance, too far away to hear—or care.
It had to be a man. Too caught up in his own ego to think about anyone else. Pathetic. She had made a policy to keep her distance from that type of person, whether he was inside a low-slung car or out of it.
She shook her head and returned her concentration to the road, relieved to see she was only two miles from the next service station. An impromptu caffeine break was in order.
It wasn’t long before she was out of the car and sitting in an uncomfortable plastic seat with a grimy mug of coffee on the table in front of her. She cupped her hands round it and let the heat warm her palms.
The crazy Porsche driver had flustered her, brought back feelings and memories she had long tried to evade. Which on the surface seemed odd, because she couldn’t even remember the accident itself.
But perhaps it was better not to have been conscious as they’d cut her from the wreckage of the family car, the bodies of her husband and daughter beside her. Not that her battered memory didn’t invent images and torture her with them in the depths of the night.
She had no clear memories of the beginning of her hospital stay either. The doctors had told her this was normal. Post-traumatic amnesia. When she tried to think back to that time it was as if a cloud had settled over it, thick and impenetrable.
Sometimes she thought it would be nice to lose herself in that fog again, because emerging from it, scarred and confused, to find her lovely Sam and her darling eight-year-old Chloe were gone for ever had been the single worst moment of her existence.
All because it had rained. And because two boys in a fast car hadn’t thought that important. They’d been arrogant, thinking those little drops of almost nothing couldn’t stop them, couldn’t spoil their fun.
She looked down at her coffee. The cup was empty, but she didn’t remember drinking it.
Just as well.
Brown scum had settled at the bottom of the cup. Ellie shook off a shudder and patted down her unruly blonde curls, tucking the ends of the long fringe behind her ears. She couldn’t sit here all day nursing an empty cup of coffee. But moving meant getting back in the car and rejoining the motorway. Something she wanted to do even less now than she had when she’d left home this morning. She closed her eyes and slowly inflated her lungs.
Come on, Ellie. The only other option is admitting defeat and going back home to hibernate for ever. You can do this. You have to. Staying at the cottage is eating you alive from the inside out. You’re stagnating.
She opened her eyelids, smoothed her T-shirt down over her jeans, swung her handbag out from underneath the table and made a straight line for the exit.
Back on the road, her geriatric car protested as she reached the speed limit. She filtered out the rattling and let the solitude of the motorway envelop her. She wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, but she wasn’t giving her attention to the road either. Her mind was in limbo—and it was wonderful.
The sun emerged from the melting clouds and flickered through the tops of the trees. She flipped the visor down to shield her eyes. The slanting light reflected off the sodden carriageway and