“For the way I left,” I told her. “For the situation I put you in. And for not reaching out to you since then.”
She scratched at a mustard stain on her apron while she considered whether or not to let me off the hook.
“And that fella you left with?” she asked. “How’s he doing?”
I started to answer, then stopped myself, then started and stopped again. I couldn’t find a way to say it that didn’t sound cold-blooded. Doris understood.
“Natural causes, was it?”
“Natural enough, given the life he led.”
“And that thing he drove you back for?”
“Settled. I have no more commitments in Tampa.”
She worked on that mustard stain some more.
“Problem is,” she told me, “anyone can say sorry. It’s a fairly easy word to pronounce, even for a Texan. A little labor, on the other hand—now that shows genuine remorse.”
“What kind of labor did you have in mind?”
“Well, my life would get a whole lot easier if I had someone back there minding the grill. Would free me up to work the floor, charm the clientele.”
“It so happens I’m a pretty good cook.”
“Is that right?”
“I went to school for it and everything.”
“You willing to roll up your sleeves? Show me how sorry you really are?”
I nodded until I thought my neck might break.
“There’s nothing I’d like more,” I said.
“Well, I guess I can give you a trial run, Mich…Wait a minute, that’s not right. What is it I should call you again?”
I thought it over. “Sarah” would sound all wrong coming out of Doris’s mouth. I’d never been Sarah Roberts-Walsh here, and I didn’t see any reason to start now.
“Let’s stick with Michelle,” I said. “Michelle Brown. That’s what it says on my driver’s license.”
Doris reached a hand across the counter.
“Welcome home, Michelle,” she said.
Miranda Cooper’s life takes a terrifying turn when an SUV deliberately runs her and her husband off a desolate Arizona road. With her husband badly wounded, she must run for help alone as his cryptic parting words echo in her head:
“Be careful who you trust.”
COME AND GET US
Please turn the page for the complete novel by James Patterson and Shan Serafin.
Chapter 1
I had no way of knowing it at the time, but when Aaron told his joke, I was thirty-nine seconds away from driving our minivan through a guardrail over a cliff and into a river. I would be steering us down a canyon, bringing the two people in this world I care about most to the brink of death.
And somehow, that wasn’t the worst thing that happened that afternoon.
This is what happened.
We were driving down a desolate stretch of highway. Three of us. Me, my husband, Aaron, and my daughter, Sierra. We were in the gorgeous no-man’s-land between Utah and Arizona, a few canyons north of the “grand” one. Normally, I’m chatty behind the wheel, trading terrible jokes and bad puns with Aaron, but roads like these leave no margin for error.
“What do you say if you meet a talking duck and an honest lawyer?” he asked.
When a car is speeding along a curvy highway and starts to lose traction near the edge of a cliff, the solution, believe it or not, is to turn toward the direction of the skid. This means toward the cliff, toward the unthinkable. It sounds logical from a physics perspective. Turning into a skid. It sounds like the sort of level-headed action that everyone at a cocktail party would nod in agreement about. Yes, do that. Steer toward the tragedy. We’d all do that obvious, logical thing.
Thirty-one seconds.
But what if the reason you’re skidding in the first place isn’t simply because you lost focus but because a three-ton black SUV has intentionally sent you into it?
There was an SUV behind us.
Inches behind us. Its menacing grill was flooding my rearview mirror, looking like Darth Vader’s helmet on wheels. The driver—fat, bearded, and ugly—was coming as close as possible to touching my minivan’s rear.
“Let him think he’s winning,” said Aaron, calmly backseat-driving me.
He was next to our four-year-old, helping her command the galactic kangaroos in her video game.
“Let him think he’s winning?” I replied. “Why?”
Sierra had recently reached what many parents herald as the new milestone in child development: how to complain about the Wi-Fi signal she needed to upgrade the game. But Aaron was her voice of reason. And mine.
I knew what he was getting at—I should calmly drift over and give the tailgater enough room to split our lane, so that he could pass us and be on his angry little way.
“I don’t want to pull over for him,” I said. “I don’t want to reward that kind of behavior.”
“He’s a grown man, not a Labrador.”
I took a breath, a yogic breath. “Fine. What do you say if you meet a talking duck and an honest lawyer?”
“Holy crap, an honest lawyer!” said Aaron, which made him laugh.
I slowed down and drifted. He was right. I was letting a trivial situation get the best of me. Time to be the adult and let it go.
I took my foot off the gas a smidgen and sure enough, my new friend came up alongside my left fender, trading his monopoly of my rearview mirror for a monopoly of the side one. I’d already prepared the perfect facial expression for him, a mix of disdain and tranquility.
But he kept that satisfaction from me.
He hovered in my blind spot, then decisively faded back into his original position.
Seventeen seconds. I immediately glanced ahead on the highway, thinking he’d seen something in front of us. Construction cones? A bridge? Trucks? But we were the only two cars out here, traveling together through the desolate desert cliffs. Before he pulled up behind us moments ago, we hadn’t seen another car for an hour.
“He’s not
