We climbed onto a narrow platform hidden beneath the old structure.
I collapsed.
Coughed river water.
Shook from cold.
Then turned and slapped Noah across the face.
He accepted it.
“You deserved that.”
“I did.”
“Fourteen years?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
His expression changed.
“Because the crash that killed Mom and Dad was not an accident.”
My anger stopped.
Our parents had died fifteen years earlier.
I was nineteen.
Noah was twenty-one.
Their car left a mountain road outside Bellmere.
Noah had been with them.
He survived with catastrophic spinal injuries.
Doctors initially told us he might never walk again.
Apparently they had been wrong.
Noah sat beside me on the concrete platform.
“I regained movement during private rehabilitation eighteen months after the crash.”
“And told no one.”
“I intended to tell you.”
“Fourteen years ago?”
“Yes.”
“What changed?”
“Someone entered my rehabilitation room at two in the morning.”
I stared.
“A nurse saw him.”
“He ran.”
“Security found a syringe in the stairwell.”
My skin went cold.
“Noah…”
“I started asking questions about Mom and Dad’s crash.”
He pulled a waterproof phone from his jacket.
