Page 1 of Born to Run Back

Prologue

Thirty-Seven Minutes

Wendy

The windshield wipers cleared the slick of late October rain as I navigated the canyon route, their steady rhythm the only sound in the drowning darkness. Driving back from Riverside, my mind was still caught between quarterly projections and the half-finished painting hanging in my apartment.

Blues. Grays. Aching emptiness. And something else I could not yet identify.

The curve of the road ahead straightened, and though I would not know it then, my entire existence was about to hang by a thread, defined by thirty-seven minutes which would change me—forever.

Sometimes, on mysterious and stormy nights like these, when no one could afford to notice, time slowed. Halted, stuttering in my chest like a skipped heartbeat.

Because I did notice. I always noticed.

There was silver, gleaming in the brilliant haze of rain-drizzled moonlight.

Metal collapsed against earth where the guardrail should have been.

Steam rose from the overturned sports car like breath in frigid winter air.

My Honda skidded as I braked, hard , tires squealing against wet asphalt.

A white BMW ahead lay upside down in the ravine, its headlights pointing skyward, as if summoning the heavens for help.

For a moment, I gripped the steering wheel. So tight, my knuckles became white as bone. Then I was out, flinging the car door open as my pantsuit swished , my heels clicking on the pavement before I could stop to think. I half-sprinted down the embankment, phone already pressed to my right ear.

“There’s been an accident on Hacienda Road, mile marker—” I looked around, not realizing yet how these numbers would haunt me. “—eighteen. Single vehicle rollover. Send help fast, please.”

The dispatcher’s voice seemed very far away, as if they were in another realm altogether.

I felt as if we were underwater, too deep in the abyss for help to reach us in time.

I knelt beside the passenger window, peering through the spiderweb of cracked glass.

A face materialized, younger than me by at least a decade, maybe more.

Early twenties perhaps, or even a teenager, and—terrified.

Eyes wide, blood trickling from her forehead.

“You’re going to be okay,” I heard myself say to her, though I didn’t entirely know if it was true. “Help is coming. Can you tell me your name?”

“D-Delaney.” The word came out broken, as if slaughtered on its way out of her throat. “Beck. Is he okay?”

Before I could peer into the driver’s side, I heard footsteps splashing through the puddles behind me.

Theo

Insomnia claimed me, wrapping itself like a silk noose around my neck.

I had tried to chase away the restlessness that clung to me, driving these canyon roads for over an hour now.

The curves of the road demanded attention, and attention was kind of what I required in these moments.

Something to pull my mind away from the never-ending stack of ungraded papers on my kitchen table, from the ache of something I wasn’t ready to name seared into my chest.

And the phone call from my sister I kept avoiding.

When I saw the brake lights, the abandoned dark gray Honda Civic on the shoulder up ahead, everything changed.

I found myself slamming on my brakes, pulling over and grabbing the first aid kit from my trunk as the rain splattered all over me.

Scaling down the ravine, I could see the figure of a thin rail of a woman in the dark, clad in a drenched pantsuit that seemed almost glued to her skin.

She looked up as I approached, and even in the dim moonlight, I could see something in her expression that drove me to move faster.

“I have some medical training,” I said, kneeling beside the driver’s door. My eyes scanned through the broken window, at the young man gasping for breath, his skin a sickly, alarming shade of white. I wrenched the car door open.

The woman nodded, her dark eyes conveying her unease. “The girl’s conscious but hurt. I don’t know about the driver. I-I can’t see him through the broken glass.”

I was already checking for a pulse, assessing the angle of the guy’s neck.

Beck, the young woman in the passenger seat kept calling him.

Mid-twenties, the kind of face that belonged to a golden hour, made to be caught in fading, honey-warm light—not this .

He was breathing, but I could hear something wrong in the sound, something that made my chest tighten.

In the distance, sirens began to wail.

Wendy

Despair swirled in the air as the driver’s labored breathing, his groans of agony, filled the emptiness, the great big silence of the canyons I’d grown to love since moving out west. A city girl, a girl who’d walked to school in the shade of New York City skyscrapers—and now here, in this town where nobody ever understood the feeling of smog rising from the vents, of eating a hotdog on the street during a heatwave, of crowds and noise and bumper-to-bumper round-the-clock traffic and. .. everything. So much of everything.

And now? Now there was a whole bunch of nothing.

I kind of loved it, even if it meant I barely knew a soul outside of coworkers and clients. The loneliness had become a part of me, ingrained in my personality, a thing of no mystery, no guesswork required.

Here lies Wendy Martin. She was lonely . That’s what my tombstone would say. And it would be enough to describe me. More than enough.

And staring back at me, horror in his sad blue eyes, was the twin to my aching loneliness. The man with the med kit, his hands making quick work of stopping the bleeding, face determined, expression raw with—fear.

The situation scared him as much as it scared me. I was just a regular person, and from the looks of it, so was he. Neither of us was equipped for this. For the brutality of it. The stench, the raw open wounds of terror and pain, shredding my sanity to pieces.

It was almost unbearable. Almost.

The man and I worked together without talking, moving as if we’d somehow done this before, as if opportunities to help young college kids in major car accidents presented themselves often.

I held Delaney’s hand through the broken window while he did what little he could for the guy, for Beck.

The rain turned to mist, but I don’t think either of us noticed until much later.

There was only this moment, this terrible intimacy of being the first ones to witness a tragedy.

What I didn’t know was that it was the beginning of the end for me, too.

Then the paramedics arrived, their equipment loud, their voices urgent. The man and I faded back, watching as the professionals took over. Jaws of life, backboards, radio chatter. All the machinery of rescue.

We sat on what remained of an upright part of the guardrail while a tow truck pulled the sporty white BMW up from the ravine. The road crew swept glass from the asphalt, and through all of it, we didn’t speak a word. Until—

“Don’t look,” he said from beside me, his voice deep, low. Distressed.

I didn’t listen. I turned my head, and watched in horror as the police zipped up a body bag—Beck. He’d been alive what felt like only a moment ago, moaning in agony, eyes shut tight as if none of it would be real if he didn’t see it.

But nothing could stop him from bleeding out. And now he was gone, this young kid who’d had his whole life ahead of him.

Delaney’s harrowing cries pierced the night air as paramedics lifted her stretcher into the ambulance. Then she was gone, too.

Whatever composure I’d maintained up until then shattered. Tears streaked down my cheeks, hidden easily in the rain, but nothing could hide the hideous noises clawing their way out of my throat.

It wasn’t fair.

He was just a kid.

It wasn’t fucking fair.

Movement beside me, a dark jacket glistening in the mist, and a large, calloused hand—grabbing my wrist, yanking me to my feet. Before I could protest, before I could ask what the hell his problem was, he pulled me into the heat of his blazing embrace.

My heart thawed, melting .

Theo

I had already known how this would end, had felt the sluggish thrum of his pulse, had heard the sound his chest had made, had seen the blood up close.

So. Much. Fucking. Blood.

The kid was dying, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop it. Not a goddamn thing.

So, I’d known, and was perhaps partially prepared for that body bag in the street—but the woman beside me was not.

Her cry was somehow worse than those kids’ and that made no sense to me.

It shouldn’t be worse, but it was. As if the last bit of support that was holding me up had suddenly shattered, and now all I could do was fall.

But I wouldn’t fall. I refused.

Without thinking, I stood, my eyes stinging, my chest constricting so tight it was a wonder I didn’t stumble, and yanked her to her feet, wordlessly pulling her into my arms. One arm around her shoulders, my hand slipping carelessly into her thick dark hair.

She smelled like rain, like the gale, like a hailstorm that could come crashing down on my head—by my guess, a five-foot-four force of nature.

And I smelled something else, something sweet. Vanilla, maybe.

She was so much shorter than me, her frame slighter than I’d realized down in the ravine. The way she’d stopped to help, comforting that girl—well, she may as well have been a giant. But in reality, she was both small and solid at the same time. She buried her face in my chest and sobbed.

I let her.

“I know,” I whispered, though I didn’t know anything except holding her in that moment felt necessary, felt right.

She didn’t pull away. She could’ve, probably should’ve, but she didn’t.

Wendy

We stayed standing there, clinging to one another.

I don’t think I’d ever done anything so outrageous in my life; hugging a stranger like my insides were spilling out and only he could stop it.

He smelled like spearmint gum and spicy aftershave, his chest solid yet yielding, letting me mold myself to him as I cried my stupid heart out like I was five years old again, fallen over on the playground with a skinned knee.

“S’okay,” he murmured, his hand in my hair, fingers flexing on my scalp.

Had anyone ever done something so intimate?

Sure, I’d slept with guys, and on occasion, women too, but that kind of nakedness didn’t compare to this kind of nakedness.

It was like I was splayed open, my skin pinned to either side of me, my skull screwed open, exposing my brain and my guts to this stranger whose name I didn’t even know.

And it didn’t even terrify me. What terrified me was stopping, ending. Of losing him and returning to my solitary observance of loneliness.

That had never happened to me before. I’d never wanted to be anything but lonely. Lonely was secure. Lonely was safe .

Yet I could clearly see us hiking in these very canyons, his large hand gripping my small one, leading me through the red rock formations.

I’d never heard the sound of his laughter, but I could almost imagine it: this rumble, a gift from deep in his chest. The corners of his eyes would crinkle, and nothing— nothing —would pull me out of his orbit.

Gravity itself would work to keep me glued to this man.

His heart was beating so, so fast. I could hear it, steady and strong against me. Did I make him nervous? Or was this whole fucked-up situation starting to get to him?

I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore.

Theo

We stayed that way until the officers called us over, until the world required signatures and details and facts and the careful documentation of how two lives had changed forever.

I wasn’t even certain I knew which two lives I was referring to.

We gave our statements separately to different officers asking the same questions. By the time I looked up from signing my report, her car was gone. I’d never even asked her name.

Standing alone beside my old, dark green Subaru Forester, watching the tow truck disappear around the bend, I felt something I couldn’t identify. Not grief—I hadn’t known those kids. Not relief—I’d helped, but it hadn’t been enough.

Connection. Warmth. A shining beacon of light in the darkness.

According to the officers, the entire ordeal had lasted only thirty-seven minutes. And for thirty-seven minutes, I had not been alone with the weight of what had taken place. Someone else had understood, had shared the weight of that heavy burden with me.

That was a lot to a guy who was consistently used to being alone. All I understood before this night was insomnia and loneliness. Of rain that never stopped, not even when the sun was out.

I’d grown up here in Puente Hills, lived in a town where I couldn’t walk ten feet without running into somebody I knew, and yet—and yet.

I was alone.

I’d been alone a long, long time.

The rain stopped. My headlights lit up the empty road and refracted off a few pieces of glass the cleanup crew had missed. I drove home through a world that felt altered somehow. Different. I couldn’t say how.

At 4:37 a.m., I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, remembering how she’d felt in my arms. She’d anchored me, that woman. Anchored me when I’d gotten so used to floating away.

And in her eyes, I’d seen something I’d never witnessed in another soul: myself. The emptiness. The ache. The comfortable safety of loneliness.

I didn’t know her name. But I knew the feeling of her small body in my arms, the sound of her breathing, the warm, vanilla scent of her hair. I knew these things as clearly as I knew my own heartbeat, and somehow, that seemed both disturbing and significant, like a secret too important to forget.

No, I wasn’t forgetting her anytime soon. I couldn’t, I don’t think, if I even tried.