Sweet Misfortune: A Novel (23 page)

Chapter 34

Open your heart a little, and it will end up hurting a lot.

W
HEN
G
ARRETT’S CAR FINALLY CAME TO A STOP, THE
only thing on his mind was Sophie. The car she was driving was thirty yards farther up the road, just shy of the bridge, wedged snuggly at a ninety-degree angle between another car and the guardrail. Checking to make sure it was safe to get out, he threw open his door, ran to the shoulder, and darted up the highway to her.

The passenger door was unlocked when he got there. He yanked it open to find Sophie hunched behind the steering wheel’s deflated air bag, with her head buried in her hands.

Garrett exhaled, relieved to see that she wasn’t seriously hurt, at least not outwardly. “Sophie, are you okay?”

She kept her face covered, hiding her tears.

The car was still running, so Garrett climbed in and turned the key. Sophie continued to cry, refusing to acknowledge him.

“Soph?”

Not knowing what else to do, Garrett reached out and put his hand on her back. She flinched, then dropped her hands from her face and sat up, wiping her nose on the back of her hand.

“I’m fine,” she said finally.

“You sure?”

She nodded.

Garrett turned to look out through the car’s rear window. “Listen, I should go and make sure everyone else is okay. You gonna be all right here for a little bit?”

“I’m going with you. I need… to see what I’ve done.”

Garrett helped her out of the car, and together they took off at a trot, going from car to car to check for injuries. Most of the people were already out along the shoulder talking, trying to sort out what had happened. One man in his fifties was complaining of minor back pain, and a woman in a pantsuit had a large bump on her forehead where she’d hit the steering column, but everyone else seemed fine. Only when they were sure that nobody needed immediate medical attention, did Garrett and Sophie make their way back to the Explorer to get out of the rain.

“Well at least everyone’s okay,” ventured Garrett, once they were inside.

Sophie stared through the window toward the Narrows. She seemed to be focused on a spot near the other shore where she’d once taken Garrett to skip a stone. She didn’t speak, or even acknowledge that she’d heard him.

“Soph? You alright?” He touched her gently.

When Sophie was ready to speak, her words came in whimpered spurts. “You… should have… told me.”

“Told you what?” Garrett drew his hand back.

Emotionally, Sophie had reached her capacity. For a full year she’d struggled with not knowing why Garrett had abandoned her. And for nineteen years before that she’d been hampered by the loss of her family, their deaths feeling like lead bricks that weighed down all hope of ever being truly happy. And now, after so much time, to find out that the two greatest tragedies of her life were inexorably connected? Adding all of that to the immediate stress over the accident she’d just caused was too much. Sophie’s emotions erupted. “You should have told me!” she repeated, this time screaming the words. She began sobbing loudly and swatted at his leg with an open palm. “You knew, and you had no right to keep it to yourself!
I deserved to know!
”

From the look on his face, that wasn’t what he’d expected her to say in the immediate aftermath of a ten car pile-up. He corralled Sophie’s hand to keep her from swinging it at him again, gently interlocking her fingers in his and pulling it close. “Soph,” he said softly, “what should I have told you? I’ll tell you anything you want.”

A man outside the car rushed up to Sophie’s window, holding a cell phone against his ear and blocking his eyes from the rain. “You guys okay?” he shouted.

Garrett nodded.

The man held up a thumb. “Excellent,” he said, loud enough to be heard through the closed door. “I think the cars were moving too slow for any major injuries. Pretty lucky!” He waved, and then left to help guide traffic past the bottleneck of Garrett’s crumpled car in the left-hand lane.

“Lucky,” Sophie mumbled quietly, sniffling. “Yeah, that’s what this is.”

Sirens were already starting to scream in the background, but Garrett tuned them out, squeezing her hand tenderly. “Talk to me, Sophie. What did I know that I should have said?”

With a menacing glare, Sophie let out a little laugh, and then yanked her fingers from his hand so she could tuck a stray hair behind her ear. “Oh… I don’t know,” she said sarcastically. “Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m just blowing it all out of proportion, and you were right not mentioning it.” Tears started falling again from the corners of her eyes, and as they cascaded down her face her emotions hit another crescendo. “Or maybe,” she barked, raising her voice sharply, “you just didn’t know how to say that you were completely disgusted by the fact that my family killed your father!”

Garrett’s face went white and his bottom lip quivered. “How do you know that?”

“So that’s it!” she shot back, angry and sad and ashamed all at once. “Well guess what! You don’t even know the whole story! My parents and grandmother were just as much victims as your dad, Garrett. It was me!
I caused the accident!
So if you want someone to blame, you’re looking at her!”

“What? That’s not true.”

“Yes.” Her voice dropped to a hollow whisper as her head fell into her hands again. “Sadly, it is. No matter what anyone says, no matter how many people tell me it’s not my fault or forgive me, it doesn’t change the facts. I was old enough to know better. I was thinking only of what I wanted. And if I hadn’t done what I did back then, my parents would still be alive. And so would your dad.”

Garrett was flustered. “Sophie… how? Is that what you’ve thought all these years? That the accident was somehow your fault?”

“It was,” she snapped defiantly.

“No,” he countered. “It wasn’t! And if I’d thought for a second that you felt responsible, I’d have told you about all this as soon as I figured it out. Even if you’d thought that your parents were at fault, I’d have set the record straight right away.”

“There’s no record to set straight, Garrett. I was there. I know what happened! And there are things that weren’t in the police report that you know nothing about.”

He sat quietly, fidgeting. “I could say the same thing,” he said eventually.

Sophie stared at him questioningly. The first emergency responders were just pulling up to the scene, sirens blaring. They almost drowned out her words. “What are you talking about?”

Looking over his shoulder, Garrett saw that police cars were pulling up in the space between his car and Sophie’s, and he knew they’d have plenty of questions. One officer was already out of her squad car, looking through the windows of his Mercedes. “I’ll explain everything, just as soon as we’re done dealing with… this.” He motioned to the line of cars behind them. “I’ve got to go find my insurance papers.”

W
HETHER IT WAS
the rain, the cold, or the miles-long traffic backing up along the highway at rush hour, everyone on the scene was doing their best to expedite the accident cleanup. Tow trucks were on the scene within ten minutes and began hauling away cars left and right. A beefy female officer spent less than two minutes talking to Garrett about how the wreck started. He’d only given a brief overview of what he’d seen before she cut him off. “Let’s cut to the chase. In your opinion, was anyone being reckless?”

“Reckless? No. Overly cautious, perhaps,” he said with a hesitant chuckle, thinking of Sophie clenching the steering wheel at forty-five miles per hour. “But not reckless.”

As soon as the officer was through with him, a tow truck backed up and hauled his vehicle away. The officer left to talk to Sophie, who was standing beside her car under an umbrella.

Garrett followed, listening as she asked Sophie the same set of questions. He had to bite his tongue when he overheard her say, “It was all my fault, Officer. It always is.”

The officer gave her a funny look. “But you were driving at a safe speed, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you got hit from behind, right?”

Sophie nodded.

“Well, then according to the law, it’s not your fault.”

“But—”

“But,” she interjected before Sophie could object, “it’s too cold for debate. If you have anything of value in the car, you should get it now. Do you have someone coming to pick you up?”

Sophie started to shake her head, but Garrett heard the question too, and said, “I’ll give you a lift, Soph. A rental car is on its way.”

She nodded again.

The police officer moved on to the next car, and Garrett joined Sophie under the umbrella. They watched silently from the shoulder of the road as the tow truck twisted her car around in the right direction and winched it up off the ground. It was starting to pull away when Sophie realized she’d forgotten something.

“The letter!” she shouted as she handed the umbrella to Garrett and took off running after the truck. “Stop!”

The driver didn’t hear her, but he saw her in his rearview mirror and stopped before he got very far. For liability reasons, he couldn’t let her get into her car while it was attached to his truck, but the man saw that she was desperate, so he got out and retrieved the letter for her. She thanked him, then jogged back to Garrett.

“What was that about?” he asked.

Sophie considered trying to explain it, but she didn’t want to get into another convoluted conversation before finishing the one they’d started twenty minutes earlier.

“Nothing,” she said. “How long until your car shows up?”

“I don’t know. Fifteen minutes. Maybe longer with all this traffic.”

Pursing her lips, she said, “Great. That should be plenty of time for you to finish what you were saying before.”

He grimaced. “I want to. But before I do, can I ask one more thing?”

She tilted her head. “Maybe.”

“How did you find out my dad was in the crash with your family?”

For the first time since leaving her store, Sophie’s mouth curled slightly at the ends in something that resembled a tiny, smug smile. “I figured it out on Sunday when I met Grandma McDonald.”

Garrett’s mouth dropped open. “You mean
that
was your trip? But… how did you find her?”

“It all started with our silly little want ad.” She paused, trying to think how to bring up Alex without giving too much away. “One of the guys who responded was a local, and he sent me something that really… touched me, I guess you could say. And I decided I wanted to meet the person who sent it.”

“So you just showed up at his house?”

“With Ellen and Evi, yeah. And it turns out we had a lot in common.

“It’s a long story. The short version is that what he sent was a huge giveaway. So I went to see him.”

“So that’s—”

“Alex? Yes.” Sophie watched his face, and was pleased to see that he seemed disappointed. “Anyway, we hit it off right away, and he sort of… motivated me, I guess, to put my past behind me once and for all. I figured the best way to do that was to go talk to the other family who lost someone that night.” She stopped again, watching him watch her. “I didn’t realize that your mom had raised you with her maiden name, but it became perfectly clear that your father’s last name wasn’t Black when Lucy told me she was your paternal grandmother.”

Garrett ran his fingers through his dark hair and sighed. “I’m such an idiot. I-if I could turn back the clock, I’d have told you this on the night I broke off our engagement. I just didn’t know how to say it. And I convinced myself that you knowing the truth would have been harder to swallow than losing me.” He shrugged. “Plus, I figured I was going to lose you either way, so I chose the way that saved me having to explain it, and saved you having to know the bitter truth.”

“Garrett,” she intoned softly, “in the words of your grandmother, what’s the punch line?”

He let out a quiet hoot. “The punch line, Sophia Maria Jones, is that you didn’t cause the accident that night.
I did.
”

Impulsively, Sophie slapped his arm. “That’s cruel! What are you doing? Making fun of me?”

“I’m being serious, Sophie. I didn’t know how to say it to you before. Knowing the effect that the accident had on your life, it made me sick to think that I’d caused you so much pain. I knew telling you would break your heart, and I knew that I couldn’t go the rest of my life hiding something like that from you. So I left.”

“You’re beyond nuts. You weren’t even there.”

He sighed again. “True. But I wasn’t far.”

She lowered her chin and folded her arms across her torso. “Explain.”

“My father always made it clear not to contact him while he was at work.” Garrett kept his eyes locked on Sophie’s. “However, he said if there was an emergency, I could call the UPS receptionist, and she could patch me in to his radio if it was important enough.” He paused, lowering his eyes briefly. “It was never important enough when I called. On the day of the accident, I got in a fight with my mom. I said things to her that I regretted afterward, and one of those was that I wanted to move out and live with my dad. He’d never really been a part of my life, but I was getting older and I desperately wanted to feel like I had a father, so I called the receptionist and asked her to put me through. He should have been just finishing his shift when I called, but I couldn’t wait until he got home. I had to talk to him right then. She put me on hold, then came back a minute later and said she couldn’t reach him. So I told her it was an emergency—it seemed like one at the time. I told her to keep trying, that he had to call me back immediately.” He stopped talking and looked at her expectantly.