“Who are you?”
She took a breath.
“I was going to be Thomas’s wife,” she said. “We were engaged. Six weeks from the wedding when it happened… the accident.”
That caught me completely off guard.
“Dad never mentioned that.”
“Thomas never told you a lot of things, I suppose,” she said quietly.
Then she began to talk.
For twenty minutes, she spoke—and in that time, she rearranged thirty years of my life.
Dad had been driving that day.
My father’s car.
My father had been in the passenger seat. My mother had been in the back.
They had been on their way to meet Amanda at the venue they had chosen for the wedding reception.
A sharp curve on a back road had caused the car to lose traction and veer off.
Thomas had been thrown clear.
My parents hadn’t.
“He called me from the hospital,” Amanda said, her gaze fixed downward. “He was barely coherent. He kept saying it was his fault. That he’d taken the turn too fast. That he should’ve known better.”
“Was it Dad’s fault?”
She shook her head slightly.
“The investigation found evidence of brake failure. The brakes had been compromised before anyone got into the car. Thomas wasn’t speeding. He hadn’t been drinking. The mechanic said there was likely nothing he could’ve done.”
“But he never believed that,” I said.
It wasn’t a question.
“Never,” she replied. “He held onto every ‘if’ he could find. If I hadn’t pushed for that road. If I’d waited. If I’d driven slower. No one could reach him.”
For illustrative purposes only
Then she told me about the call from the social worker.
I was three years old. No surviving relatives.
I would be placed into foster care.
Thomas had refused to let that happen.
He told Amanda they would adopt me together.
That he owed his best friend that much.
That he couldn’t abandon a child who had no one left.
Amanda’s voice softened.
“I told him I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t strong enough to raise a child from so much loss. I couldn’t be what he needed.”
Thomas had listened.
He had held her hand.
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