Page 3 of Born to Run Back

Chapter Two

Shadows in Motion

Wendy

The lie I’d been telling myself evolved, becoming more sophisticated with each passing day.

I wasn’t obsessing, not really. I was… processing.

I wasn’t stalking a memory; I was healing through trying to find meaning in it somehow.

The stack of printouts on my kitchen counter wasn’t evidence of an unhealthy fixation but rather, responsible research into the kind of accidents that occurred on canyon roads.

For safety purposes, of course. Educational purposes.

Perfectly reasonable purposes that had nothing to do with the way my pulse quickened every time I smelled the tiniest hint of spearmint, or the way I’d started taking the long route home from client meetings.

The route that happened to wind through Hacienda Road.

The route that happened to pass mile marker eighteen.

My work was suffering. I’d missed three client deadlines this week alone, sitting in my office chair and staring at quarterly budget projections while my mind wandered to the curve of Hacienda Road, to the exact angle of twisted metal against brown earth.

My assistant had started knocking more insistently, his voice carrying that careful note people use when they think you might be having some kind of a breakdown.

Well, maybe I fucking was.

The sketches were sort of the worst part.

I’d find them later, scattered across my desk like evidence of sleepwalking; quick, violent strokes of charcoal, capturing the brutal geometry of the accident.

Broken glass. Bent guardrails. Steam rising from an overturned sedan.

My subconscious apparently had perfect recall for trauma, could reproduce every horrible, ugly detail with the accuracy of a police photographer.

I told myself it was meant to be cathartic. Art therapy, you know. A healthy way to process what I’d witnessed.

But I knew better. Even as I lied to myself, I knew.

The internet searches had started out innocently enough.

Merely checking to see if there were any updates on the victims, any follow-up stories about what had caused the accident that night.

But innocent had morphed into thorough, and thorough had become obsessive, and now I knew things that had nothing at all to do with closure and everything to do with the hollow ache in my chest that only grew and grew, like some kind of monster I couldn’t banish back into the dark.

Delaney Lewis, nineteen. Art major at Cal State Fullerton.

Her Instagram was still active, only maintained by supportive friends as she grieved, posting their memories and leaving endless hearts on everything.

Benedict ‘Beck’ Foster, twenty-two. Pre-med at UC Riverside.

His obituary made mention of a younger sister and parents who’d immigrated from Canada in the nineties.

I’d printed their pictures, high school graduation photos with bright smiles and futures stretching endlessly ahead with no expected tragedy in sight. I’d taped them to my bathroom mirror, and they watched me brush my teeth every morning with their young, hopeful faces.

I knew this was not normal behavior. This was the behavior of someone who’d lost her grip entirely.

But I couldn’t stop.

“You sound tireder than usual, sweetie,” Mom kept saying over the phone. I’d been avoiding her FaceTimes like the plague.

“Just a lot of deadlines at work,” came my practiced excuse.

“It’s not even tax season, Wendy,” Dad said from the background. “What could possibly be making you so tired?”

What could?

Tuesday at 2:30 a.m. had become a sacred appointment, marked in red ink like any other obligation.

I’d tried skipping it once, forcing myself to stay home, to break the dreadful pattern before it consumed me entirely.

I’d lasted until 2:49 a.m. before throwing on clothes and racing through empty, dead streets, my heart hammering like I was late for something crucial, something that mattered more than sleep or sanity or the carefully constructed boundaries of normal life.

Tonight? It was no different. I parked in the same spot, my Honda’s headlights sweeping across the unchanged landscape of scrub brush and scarred red and brown earth.

The flowers I’d brought two weeks ago were long gone now, scattered by wind or cleaned up by highway maintenance, but the stones were still there.

A thoughtful arrangement of smooth river rocks, which were a recent addition to the crash site, placed with care near where the sedan had fallen.

Someone else came here. Someone else understood.

My hands were shaking as I cut the engine, my pulse racing with the kind of electric anticipation I hadn’t felt since I was a kid, since the awful, wonderful terror of wondering if the boy or girl you liked might like you back.

Except this wasn’t a high school romance.

This was something else entirely, something darker, more desperate, and infinitely more dangerous.

I chased it like it was a high.

I knew, somewhere deep in the rational part of my brain that was growing smaller and smaller each day, that this was about him.

The man who’d held me when I’d fallen apart, whose steady presence had been the only real thing in a night full of surreal horror, of steam and blood and a teenage girl’s harrowing cries in the dark.

I was using those poor kids as an excuse to find him, to maintain some kind of connection to the only person who’d witnessed my complete breakdown and hadn’t turned away.

He’d stayed, and that mattered.

But God, the guilt was almost unbearable. Not unbearable enough to make me stop, but unbearable all the same.

I climbed out of my car and walked to the stone cairn, adding my own smooth rock to the collection, one I’d taken from the parking lot of my apartment complex, painted with clear nail polish so it would catch the moonlight, and perhaps sparkle and catch his eye.

A pathetic gesture, really, but it felt like a conversation, almost. It was a way of leaving a note for someone I’d never learned to reach any other way.

Standing there in the darkness, I let myself imagine him doing the exact same thing.

Driving here in the middle of the night, compelled by the same inexplicable need that had wrapped itself around my ribs like barbed wire.

Maybe he was an insomniac, too. Maybe he’d been replaying that night the way I had, over and over, trying to understand how thirty-seven minutes with a stranger could rewrite everything you thought you knew about yourself.

Maybe he still thought about the way I’d felt in his arms, small and too thin, desperately grateful for the anchor of his presence.

Maybe he wondered about my name the way I wondered about his.

The fantasy was both intoxicating and horrible in equal measure, a fever dream that felt more real than anything in my actual life.

I could spend hours imagining conversations we’d never had, walks we’d never taken, moments of ordinary intimacy built on a foundation of shared trauma that probably wasn’t strong enough to support the weight of a real relationship.

But standing there, the cold October air raising goosebumps on my arms and my painted rock glinting furiously among the others, I didn’t care about the goddamn foundation.

I didn’t care about logic or healthy boundaries or the voice in my head that sounded increasingly like my mother, warning me about the dangers of getting too attached too quickly to the wrong kinds of people.

All I cared about was the possibility that somewhere in this vast, sprawling desert town, he might be lying awake, too, staring at his ceiling and thinking about a woman whose name he’d never learned. A woman whose tears had soaked through his jacket on the worst night of both their lives.

At exactly 2:30 a.m. each Tuesday night, I thought I heard his car.

But he never showed.

Theo

Tuesday, 1:42 p.m., same day

“The steam engine revolutionized transportation and manufacturing, fundamentally altering the social fabric of—” I paused mid-sentence, staring at the whiteboard where I’d written “Industrial Revolution: Key Innovations” in my usual block letters.

The marker felt foreign in my hand, like I was holding someone else’s tool, living someone else’s life.

Twenty-six pairs of eyes stared back at me with varying degrees of attention.

Most of my AP World History students were good kids.

Motivated, curious, the kind who actually did the reading.

But today, they looked like strangers to me, these teenagers with their smartphones hidden under their desks and their college dreams gleaming brightly in their eyes.

When had I stopped seeing them as individuals and started seeing them as yet another obligation to fulfill?

What the fuck was happening to me?

“Mr. Garner?” Luz Rodríguez raised her hand, concern creasing her forehead. “Are you alright?”

I blinked, realizing I’d been standing there like that for at least thirty seconds, marker poised mid-air like I was conducting an invisible orchestra.

The curve of Hacienda Road had superimposed itself over the classroom, mile marker eighteen flickering in my peripheral vision like a migraine aura.

“Sorry, I was just... thinking through the chronology.” I turned back to the board, writing “1804 - First practical steam locomotive” in handwriting that looked shakier than usual. “As I was saying, James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine created ripple effects throughout...”

But I wasn’t thinking about James Watt or ripple effects or any part of the lesson plan I’d taught at least a dozen times before.

I was thinking about shiny, smooth stones and vanilla-scented hair and the cruel intimacy of watching someone die.

I was thinking about white roses placed with ritual care and the growing certainty that I was losing my mind one sleepless night at a time.