The snow hit the windshield like a fistful of diamonds thrown by an angry sky, and for one wild second, Mindy thought, So this is what a bad decision feels like at sixty miles an hour on a New York highway.

Hours earlier, that storm had been nothing more than a warning on a phone screen in their cozy townhouse kitchen just outside Albany. Back then, there had been warm coffee, the smell of toasted bread, and her husband hugging her from behind like the world was soft and safe and simple.

Now the world was nothing but white.

That morning had started like a scene from a lifestyle commercial.

Gray clouds hung low over the quiet American suburb. The houses were still, yards frosted just enough to look pretty but not yet cruel. In the kitchen, the coffee pot burbled, filling the air with the rich scent of dark roast from a grocery store down the road. A radio from New York City murmured about traffic on I-87 and a possible winter storm moving in from the Great Lakes.

Mindy stood barefoot at the counter in one of Wayne’s oversized college T-shirts, her hair loose and messy around her shoulders. She hummed under her breath as she poured coffee and dropped slices of bread into the toaster. It was early, that soft American kind of early when neighbors moved quietly and the world hadn’t decided yet if it was going to be kind or not.

Her husband stopped in the doorway and just watched her for a moment, one arm resting on the frame, a little smile pulling at his lips.

He didn’t say anything.

He just stood there like a man watching his favorite dream move around his kitchen.

When he finally walked over and slid his arms around her waist, Mindy startled, then laughed.

“You scared me,” she said.

“You’re like my dream,” he murmured into her hair.

“Me?” She tilted her head. “What kind of dream?”

“The kind I had when I was seventeen,” Wayne said. “I’d picture this little house somewhere in upstate New York. I’d wake up, walk into the kitchen, and there she’d be—this girl, barefoot, wearing my T-shirt, making coffee like she’d lived there forever.”

Mindy smiled, pleased and amused. “Wow. And here I thought teenage boys only dreamed about… other things.”

“We do,” he said. “We just don’t brag about the romantic ones. Not cool, you know. We’re supposed to be all instinct and zero feelings.”

“Good thing you don’t have to pretend with me.”

“Well, you did marry me. You’re legally obligated to tolerate the soft parts.”

They sat at the small kitchen table, steaming mugs between them, toast cooling on their plates. Outside, the sky hung heavy, the color of old paper. Mindy glanced at the time on her phone and sighed.

“It’s a shame,” she said. “This is the kind of morning that should last all day. Coffee, couch, Netflix, cat. Instead, I have three hundred miles of highway and one very stubborn grandmother-in-law waiting at a summer house in the middle of nowhere.”

Wayne frowned, his gaze drifting toward the window. “Don’t go today,” he said suddenly. “Seriously, Min. I’ve got a bad feeling.”

“You and your feelings,” she teased. “You get a bad feeling every time I drive more than twenty miles.”

“I’m serious.” His eyes were darker now, focused. “They’re saying there’s a snowstorm blowing down from Canada. It’s not just flurries. They’re talking blizzard conditions all the way up past Saratoga. Let me call Grandma and tell her I’ll get her tomorrow.”

“You know the reception out there,” Mindy reminded him. “One in ten calls manages to get through. If she’s sitting in that freezing little cottage with her suitcase packed, and I don’t show up…” She shook her head. “She’s going to throw her old-lady tantrum and tell everybody in her church that I left her to freeze for the winter.”

Wayne snorted. “So what? She already thinks I’m useless.”

“She likes me,” Mindy said. “I’d like to keep that miracle alive.”

He reached for her hand. “Mindy, they said snowstorm. I don’t like you driving upstate alone in that kind of weather.”

“If it gets too bad, I’ll pull over, turn around, or stay over in some motel,” she said. “Relax. I’ve been driving for ten years, remember? I’m not a kid.”

“You drive fine,” Wayne said quietly. “It’s everyone else I don’t trust.”

“Then you go,” she said, lifting one brow. “You pick up your grandmother and bring her home. I’ll stay here, make more coffee, and text you supportive emojis.”

His face twisted. He loved his grandmother in theory, the way you love a difficult aunt who only visits at Christmas. In reality, he lasted about twenty minutes around her before grinding his teeth.

“You know I don’t get along with her,” he grumbled. “She treats me like I’m still ten and stole her lipstick.”

“And she treats me like I’m the only competent adult in this family,” Mindy said. “Which, to be fair, is accurate.”

He chuckled despite himself.

She leaned over, kissed his cheek, and squeezed his hand. “I’ll be fine. Stop worrying. If it gets bad, I’ll pull over. I promise.”

He hesitated, then nodded, like a man signing a deal he didn’t like but couldn’t stop.

“Text me from every town you pass,” he said. “If you don’t, I’m calling the state troopers.”

“Deal.”

Mindy finished her coffee, grabbed the overnight bag she’d already packed, and headed for the door. Her boots thunked against the hardwood. Wayne followed, leaning on the doorway as she shrugged into her jacket.

He kissed her longer than usual before she left.

She waved as she backed out of the driveway, wheel turning toward the interstate that would carry her north, toward the little village where his grandmother sat in an old wooden house that creaked louder each winter.

He watched the car disappear and told himself the unease in his stomach was nothing but habit.

But that unease was not entirely about the weather.

For Wayne, loving Mindy had always felt like handling something more valuable than he deserved—like a museum letting him borrow a painting for the weekend. His affection twisted together with something else he barely admitted to himself: the knowledge that he’d married above his class, above his courage, above his moral weight.

Mindy seemed strong. Fearless. She’d grown up with the kind of hard American childhood Wayne had only seen in documentaries.

Her parents had died in a car accident on a wet county road when she was five. Her older sister, Holly, barely twenty, had taken over without complaint. College by day, shifts at a diner by night, a little girl to raise in between. No grandparents with spare rooms. No trust funds. Just cheap apartments and endless responsibility.

Holly insisted Mindy learn to defend herself and never be helpless. At six, Mindy was punching padded targets in a kids’ martial arts class at the YMCA, learning how to fall without breaking, how to breathe through impact. At nine, she strapped a snowboard to her feet in the Catskills and flew down icy slopes faster than some grown men.

By sixteen, Mindy could change a tire faster than most mechanics. Their neighbor ran a small auto shop; when she begged him for a job, he laughed and said a teenage girl couldn’t handle grease and engines. Mindy promised that if she couldn’t, she’d quit.

Four months later, she was fixing minor issues on her own. Six months after that, she was one of his best workers. She bought a used car for next to nothing and rebuilt it herself in the garage, turning bolts with the same stubborn care she brought to everything.

“A car is personal,” she’d told him once. “No one knows what I need from it better than me.”

Wayne had adored this about her. Her toughness made him feel safer, somehow. Protected by someone who’d actually met the world’s worst days and survived them.

But you can love something and still be willing to break it, if what you want feels big enough.

Unfortunately for Mindy, Wayne’s wants were enormous, and his conscience small.

The forecast was right.

By midday, the storm rolled down from the north like a living thing.

At first, it was just a few flakes on the windshield, melting as soon as they touched glass. Then the sky thickened, bleaching lighter and lighter until the horizon disappeared. The snowfall went from gentle to furious in minutes, white sheets hammering the road so hard Mindy had to lean forward to see.

Her wipers squealed across the glass, swiping the snow away—once, twice, three times—

Then stopped.

Frozen mid-arc like a broken metronome.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mindy muttered, tapping the control. Nothing. She tested it again and again. The wipers shuddered, jerked, and died.

The windshield began to film over with heavy wet flakes.

Driving on the interstate in a New York blizzard without functioning wipers was basically asking to become a headline.

She should have turned back.

She knew it.

If it weren’t for the mental image of Wayne’s grandmother bundled by the cold window at the summer house, waiting, Mindy would have pulled off the next exit and found a motel. But the road shoulders were already buried. The nearest town was miles behind her. The next exit was still far ahead, invisible in the white.

She tried to call Grandma.

No signal.

Of course.

“Okay,” Mindy told herself, blinking through the small patch of glass that her defroster kept semi-clear. “You’ve driven in worse. You’ve got snow tires. You don’t panic. You don’t do stupid things. You slow down, keep straight, and—”

A flash of headlights burst through the curtain of white, screaming across the center line.

The SUV came out of nowhere.

Mindy saw the grille, the raised bumper, the wide, shiny newness of it—the kind you saw in polished dealership commercials, not roaring through a whiteout like a missile. For one split second, she thought, Nice car, absurdly.

Then there was nothing but impact.

Later, she would remember the sound more than anything.

Metal folding like cardboard. Glass exploding in a shower of glitter. Her body thrown forward and yanked back by the seatbelt that cut into her chest like a steel fist. Her hands flew off the wheel, instinctively reaching out to shield her face, as if her fingers could stop a ton of American steel.

Then blackness—thick, heavy, and absolute.

The next thing she knew, there was light pressing against her closed eyes, not sunlight, but something colder and flatter. Her entire body pulsed with pain, each breath a careful negotiation.

For the first few days in the Albany trauma ward, Mindy’s world shrank to that narrow hospital bed and the voice of a nurse telling her where she was.

The list of injuries sounded like someone reading off a car manual that had gone through a shredder.

Concussion. Fractured ribs. Broken left leg. Broken right arm. Dislocated shoulder. Cuts. Bruises. Internal bruising. Miracles.

She drifted in and out under waves of pain medication, dimly aware of voices, beeping machines, the smell of antiseptic. Every time she woke, she would stare at the too-white ceiling and think, Not my bedroom. Hospital. Crash. Still alive.

Still alive.

That thought carried a strange edge of stubborn triumph.

She might be broken, but she had not become a headline.

On the fourth day, when the pain eased enough for her to string thoughts together, she met the attending physician assigned to her case.

He did not look like a typical doctor from a polished hospital commercial in the States.

His name was Dr. Rowan Hayes, though everyone called him Dr. Ro.

He walked in wearing standard hospital scrubs, but that was where the standard ended. His dark hair was long enough to tie back neatly. A small silver stud glinted in one ear. Tattoos curved up his forearms, peeking out from under his sleeves—compass lines, a cluster of stars, a wolf’s outline, inked in subtle blacks and grays.

If you’d seen him on a Brooklyn street at night, you might have assumed musician, not neurologist.

But when he spoke, the clinical excitement in his brown eyes was pure science geek.

“You,” he said cheerfully, peering at her chart, “have a near textbook concussion. It’s almost perfect.”

Mindy grimaced. Her right cheek felt swollen, her lips stiff.

“Well,” she rasped, “I’m glad I finally achieved perfection in something. I always thought it would be baking.”

He laughed, delighted. “Good. Humor is an excellent sign. When patients lose that, they become much harder to treat.”

“So I get bonus points?”

“You get faster recovery odds,” he said. “Your brain got shaken hard, but the scans look… surprisingly decent considering the crash photos. You’re a fighter.”

“I was strapped into a Toyota,” she muttered. “The real fighter is Japanese engineering.”

He chuckled again, checked her reflexes, her eyes, her responses.

The days blurred.

Wayne came every evening, bringing audiobooks on his tablet and carefully curated “calm” playlists like some penitent DJ.

“The doctor says nothing too emotional,” he said. “So… classics, but not the tragic ones. No crying heroines. No tragic endings.”

“I’m offended you think I’d cry at a book,” Mindy said.

“You cried at that dog movie.”

“The dog died,” she said. “That’s a crime against humanity.”

He loaded Tom Sawyer, White Fang, meditations for healing and sleep, guided breathing in gentle American voices selling inner peace like a subscription service.

Sometimes Mindy listened.

Sometimes she ignored it and let her thoughts wander to the moment the wipers quit, the flash of headlights, the impossible angle of that SUV.

They said the driver had been hysterical.

He’d just bought the vehicle, wasn’t used to its weight, made a mistake passing in the storm. He cried, apparently, when he saw her being pulled from the wreck. Promised to pay every bill. Swore he’d never drive in bad weather again.

Wayne repeated these details almost word for word.

Later, when the shock wore off, Missy would wonder why he’d been so detailed. Why he kept circling back to the other driver’s remorse as if polishing it.

Right now, she just focused on staying awake long enough to sit up for ten minutes without puking.

Her body was a war zone.

Standing on her own two feet for the first time, three weeks after the accident, felt like summiting a mountain. Even with a crutch under one arm and Wayne supporting her other side, it was hard, stupidly hard.

“Victory over yourself,” Dr. Ro said when she made it from bed to bathroom and back. “That’s the best kind, you know.”

“Whoever said that never had to do it with a fractured femur,” Mindy muttered, but there was warmth in it.

Healing brought new problems.

Like her hair.

Three weeks of painkillers and hospital pillows had transformed her once-long, dark curls into something that looked like it had been attacked by squirrels in the night. No amount of gentle finger-combing helped.

“This is… impressive,” Wayne admitted, staring at the nest.

“You think?” Mindy said dryly. “We could rent it to wildlife.”

“I can try to brush it.”

“Please do not come near me with a brush,” she said. “You’ll rip my scalp off. Just get scissors.”

He gaped. “Scissors? No way. You love your hair. It took you years to grow it.”

“It also takes twenty minutes to detangle on a good day,” she said. “And I now have one working arm and the energy of a dying snail. Cut it off.”

“We can fix it,” he tried. “We can—”

“Wayne,” she said, voice flat. “I have broken bones. I can’t shower alone. I can’t walk more than thirty steps without wanting to faint. I’m not adding ‘tackle a lion’s mane’ to my rehab list. Go. Buy scissors.”

He went.

He came back, visibly grieving, holding a pair of plain pharmacy scissors like he was carrying an instrument of crime.

The haircut was chaotic.

All the worst tangles were cut at the root. Some sections were left long, others short. When they were done, Mindy looked in the mirror and burst out laughing.

The reflection that stared back at her looked several years younger—cheekbones sharper, neck longer, eyes larger without all that hair pulling her down. Her new cut skimmed her jawline in messy layers, uneven but somehow stylish in a careless way.

Wayne, however, looked stricken.

“Your hair,” he whispered. “It was your… jewelry.”

“Hair grows back,” she said. “Broken bones grow back slower. I picked my battle.”

Dr. Ro walked in a day later, saw her, and actually clapped once.

“New look,” he said. “I like it. You look lighter.”

“Less like someone who lost a wrestling match with a brush,” Mindy said.

“You look younger,” he added. “Not that you looked old. You just… look like someone who survived something and decided to change.”

Wayne rolled his eyes dramatically. “You two and your hairstyles. I’m in mourning.”

Mindy stuck her tongue out at him.

Recovery was slow, but steady.

Her concussion, Dr. Ro had explained, was “perfect”—a textbook case. Which translated into constant nausea and dizzy waves whenever she opened her eyes too fast. That part was less fun.

Most days, she lay with her eyes closed, listening to meditations, to old American classics, to Wayne’s commentary on local news, to the soft squeak of nurses’ shoes on linoleum. She learned the rhythm of the hospital: the early morning blood draws, the lunch tray clatter, the mid-shift laughter of nurses trying to stay awake.

She learned their names.

Including one she could have done without.

Betsy.

Betsy was a nurse with bright lipstick, too much perfume, and the subtlety of a fire alarm. She flirted with the younger doctors, fawned over the older ones, and constantly hovered around patients like a hummingbird that never shut up.

More than once, Dr. Ro had gently told her to fetch a chart or check someone else’s vitals just to get her out of the room.

“Oh, Betsy,” he’d sigh when she left. “So much energy, so little aim.”

Mindy found her annoying, but harmless.

She was wrong.

One night, about a month after the crash, Mindy woke with her throat so dry it hurt. She groped for the water bottle on her bedside table and found nothing. The mug was empty too.

Perfect.

Wayne had gone home hours ago, forgetting to refill it. The tap water in the tiny bathroom tasted metallic and warm, like licking a pipe. She rinsed her mouth and spat, grimacing.

Her leg ached. Her ribs ached. She didn’t want to move. But her body needed water the way a desert needed rain.

She grabbed her crutch, pushed herself upright, and tested her balance. The world wobbled slightly, but held.

The hallway outside her room was dimly lit, bathed in that soft yellow light hospitals loved—bright enough for safety, dim enough for sleep. She could hear murmurs from the nurses’ station around the corner.

Good. She wouldn’t have to wake anyone up.

As she approached the corner, however, voices became clearer.

Very familiar voices.

Wayne’s.

And Betsy’s.

Mindy paused, her fingers tightening around the crutch.

She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but her name stopped her feet cold.

“I’ve done everything I could,” Wayne was saying. His voice was low, tense. “What else did you expect me to do?”

“Everything?” Betsy hissed back. “You call this everything?” Her voice was a harsh whisper, vibrating with anger. “She’s alive, Wayne. She’s healing. She’s walking on a crutch. That’s what your ‘everything’ achieved.”

Mindy’s heart stopped, then slammed into double-time.

She pressed herself against the wall, breath shallow.

“Keep your voice down,” Wayne snapped. “You want the whole floor to hear you?”

“I want you to hear me,” Betsy shot back. “You told me you’d take care of it. You told me we’d be on a beach by now, some island off Florida, sipping cocktails and laughing about the past. Instead, your wife is down the hall making recovery progress, and I’m still working night shifts in Albany.”

The hallway tilted.

Mindy forced herself to breathe.

No, she thought. No, no, no.

It couldn’t be what it sounded like.

Except it already was.

Wayne exhaled. “You think I wanted the crash to fail?”

Crash.

Mindy’s fingers went cold.

“I couldn’t tamper with the brakes,” he hissed. “Any decent investigator would see that. You have to make it look like a freak accident. Wipers freezing in a snowstorm? That happens.”

“You broke the windshield wipers.” Betsy’s tone dripped contempt. “Wow. You really went above and beyond. Maybe next time you can hide her sunglasses so she squints and gets a wrinkle. That’s about your level of effectiveness.”

“I checked the weather,” Wayne said sharply. “I knew a snowstorm was moving in from Canada. I told her my grandmother had called asking for a ride. She loves looking like a hero. She drove right into it. No one was supposed to survive a head-on collision like that, in that weather. No one.”

“But she did,” Betsy spat. “And now what? Our little dream of inherited millions just freezes on the shelf?”

Mindy’s mouth went dry for a completely different reason.

Inheritance?

What inheritance?

Betsy continued, her voice dropping into a bitter whisper. “My whole life I’ve been stuck in shared apartments and used cars. You promised me something different. You promised me a house near the water, weekends in Miami, a life where I don’t have to smell antiseptic and cafeteria tuna every day. You told me we just had to get rid of your wife.”

“I didn’t say it like that,” Wayne protested weakly.

“That’s what you meant.”

A chair scraped softly. Mindy imagined Betsy leaning in close, her perfume filling the small station.

“So what now?” Betsy demanded. “You going to go back to your wholesome American marriage, pretend you weren’t planning to make yourself a widower?”

“We are not going back to anything,” Wayne said. “We are adjusting the plan.”

“Oh, fantastic,” Betsy sneered. “What’s next? Loosen a light bulb and hope it falls on her?”

“You work in this hospital,” Wayne said, his voice suddenly low and coaxing. “You have access to medications, charts. Allergies, dosages. Think about how easy it would be to… make a mistake. An injection here, a drug interaction there. You’d look like a nurse trying her best, blindsided by a rare reaction.”

Mindy’s stomach rolled.

“So you want me to do it,” Betsy said slowly. “You couldn’t even break a windshield wiper without messing up your big plan. And now you want me to become the villain in your story?”

“You wouldn’t be alone,” he whispered. “We’d be in it together. You and me, Bets. Sunshine and ocean and a bank account that finally looks like it belongs in America and not some sad reality show about debt.”

He paused.

“Mindy’s uncle died,” he added, almost conversationally. “You know that, right?”

Mindy blinked.

She did not know that.

“He lived down in Florida,” Wayne went on. “Had a liquor store franchise, real estate, investments. No children. No spouse. Just one niece. Do you know who that niece is, Betsy?”

Silence.

“Her,” Betsy breathed.

“Her,” Wayne confirmed. “You think I married her for her cooking?”

Mindy swallowed a hysterical, horrified laugh.

She’d never been good at cooking.

She had married for love, because she believed in it.

He had married for money he hadn’t even told her about.

“If she dies before she learns about the inheritance,” Wayne said, “I get everything as her only legal heir. A mansion near Tampa, two luxury cars, two liquor stores printing money every day. We could move out of the snow and never scrape ice off a windshield again.”

He let the words sink in.

“I need you,” he murmured. “You, Betsy. You’re the one with the access now. She trusts this place. She trusts you. Do this, and we both walk away rich.”

Betsy was silent for several long seconds.

Mindy could hear her own heartbeat louder than any monitor.

“I’m not going to jail for you,” Betsy said finally. “You made the first attempt on your own. If I help now and you chicken out or decide you don’t want to share… I’m the one they’ll lock up. Not you.”

“Stop being dramatic,” Wayne whispered. “This is not a movie. Take a breath.”

“It feels like one,” Betsy shot back. “And I am not going down as the villain in your little crime drama.”

Silence.

“Fine,” Wayne said coldly. “Then we’re done. Forget the beaches. Forget the house. Forget any future where your scrubs don’t smell like disinfectant. I thought you loved me enough to do what needed to be done.”

He pushed his chair back.

Mindy heard the scrape of feet, imagined him turning away, his expression wounded.

“You never loved me,” he sighed. “You just loved the idea of me with a full bank account.”

“Wait,” Betsy blurted.

Mindy could practically hear her desperation.

She bit her lip so hard it hurt. Part of her wanted to limp around the corner and smash the crutch into his face, again and again, until that fake hurt expression broke.

Instead, she slipped her phone out of her hospital gown pocket with her good hand and thumbed the screen awake.

Her fingers shook.

She hit the record button and held the phone close, the small red dot staring back at her like a tiny, burning eye.

“Wayne,” Betsy said, softer now. “I… I’m just scared.”

“So am I,” he replied. “Scared of going back to that rental, to that life, pretending everything is fine while knowing a fortune is sitting in another state with my last name practically written on it. We’re this close, Bets. Don’t get squeamish now.”

“How would we even do it?” she whispered. “She’s recovering. She’s monitored, checked, scanned…”

“You’re the professional,” he reminded. “I’m just the concerned husband. You find the how. You know the meds, the dosages. You pick something that looks like an allergy, a complication, a fluke. You cry at the funeral. Everyone calls you an angel.”

A small, ugly silence followed.

Mindy’s hand tightened on the crutch.

Finally, Betsy laughed softly, a strange, nervous sound.

“You’re a dangerous man, Wayne,” she said. “All sweet eyes and sad stories over there, and murder in your mouth over here.”

“And you,” he said, “are smarter than you pretend to be. That’s why I like you.”

Mindy had heard enough.

The rage hit her not like fire, but like ice—clean, focused, sharp.

She turned the corner.

The rubber tip of her crutch thumped loudly against the hallway floor.

Betsy and Wayne jerked apart.

In the weak yellow light, they looked like two teenagers caught doing something they both knew was wrong, except this was not a secret kiss behind the gym.

This was conspiracy.

“Oh,” Mindy said, her voice calm and clear in a way that astonished even her. “So this is what the night shift is for.”

Wayne’s face drained of color. “Mindy,” he said. “What are you doing out of bed?”

“Looking for water,” she said. “And apparently, my murderers.”

“You’re confused,” Wayne snapped quickly. “You had a concussion. You’re mixing dreams with reality. Go back to bed, we’ll talk in the morning—”

She tilted her head. “You know what’s amazing?” she said softly. “Of all the things I’ve fixed in my life—cars, appliances, bad decisions—I did not realize my marriage needed a mechanic most of all.”

Betsy found her voice first. “Mindy, you shouldn’t be walking,” she said, too brightly. “You could fall—”

“Fall?” Mindy repeated. “Yes, that would make the insurance claim easier, wouldn’t it?”

“You’re not making sense,” Wayne said through clenched teeth.

“No?” Mindy lifted her phone. The screen still glowed, the recording still ticking silently at the top. “Maybe the cameras will help, then.”

Wayne froze.

“What cameras?” he asked slowly.

Mindy smiled, all teeth. “You know my job, right? Or have you been too busy planning my early funeral to remember? I work for a company that installs security systems. Card access, alarms, surveillance.” She gestured vaguely toward the corners of the ceiling. “We installed cameras in this hospital last month. Top of the line, hidden in vent covers and smoke detectors. The clinic owner wanted everything discreet.”

Betsy went sheet-white.

“You’re lying,” she whispered.

“Maybe,” Mindy said. “Maybe not. But I bet the Albany Police Department will be very interested in checking. I hear they love real-life drama. Add in the audio file I just recorded of you two discussing how to finish me off, and… I think we have enough for a solid true crime documentary.”

“You… you recorded us?” Wayne stammered.

Mindy wiggled her phone. “Every word about wipers, weather reports, and Florida mansions.”

“You—you can’t prove anything,” he blurted. “Who would believe that I meant any of that? I was upset. Joking. You know me, Min—”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Unfortunately, I do know you.”

Betsy started crying. Not pretty tears. Ugly, hiccuping sobs that made her shoulders shake.

“I didn’t do anything yet,” she gasped. “I didn’t touch her. I didn’t inject anything. It was all him. He broke the wipers, he lied about his grandmother calling, he—”

Mindy raised her hand.

“That’s enough,” she said. “Save it for the detectives.”

Wayne stepped forward, hands out as if approaching a skittish animal. “Mindy, please,” he said softly. “Think about what you’re doing. You’re angry. I get it. But do you really want your whole life dissected in court? Your family dragged in? Maybe we can talk about this—”

She laughed once, short and sharp.

“Wayne,” she said, “you tried to kill me with a car and then came back for a second round with a nurse. We have passed the ‘talk it out over coffee’ stage.”

Dr. Ro appeared then at the end of the hall, rubbing his eyes, clearly freshly awakened.

“What’s going on?” he asked, taking in the scene: Mindy with a crutch and a wild look, Wayne pale and sweating, Betsy crumpled in a chair, mascara tracks down her cheeks.

“The short version?” Mindy said without taking her eyes off her husband. “My husband and your nurse were brainstorming ways to turn me into a tragic hospital statistic. I think it’s time to call the police.”

There was a moment—half a breath—where no one moved.

Then Dr. Ro did exactly what she needed him to do.

He believed her.

Ten minutes later, hospital security stood in that same hallway, and Albany PD had been called.

Wayne deflated like a balloon with a slow leak. By the time the officers arrived, the sharp edge in him had dulled into gray resignation. Betsy, faced with the words “investigation” and “attempted homicide,” cracked faster than thin ice in early spring.

She told them everything.

The broken wipers.

The lie about Grandma calling.

The promise of Florida.

The talk of “accidents” in the hospital.

She talked and talked, as if words could build a bridge out of the hole she’d dug.

Wayne’s lawyer would later argue that no one had died; that there was no proof the wipers had been damaged intentionally; that everything sounded worse out loud than it had in his head.

The recordings, combined with Betsy’s full confession, told a different story.

Mindy testified sitting in a chair, leg still in a brace. She spoke calmly, clearly, her short hair falling into her eyes when she tilted her head toward the judge.

Wayne watched her from the defendant’s table like a man staring at the wreckage of his own decisions.

He tried not to care.

He tried not to feel.

By the time the sentence was read, he had stopped trying.

He didn’t protest.

Didn’t cry.

Didn’t beg.

He just listened to the number of years, nodded once, and let the dullness take him.

Prison, he thought, might be simpler than the life he’d tried to build on sand.

Mindy was not interested in what he thought anymore.

She had other things to do.

Like learn how to walk down a hallway without a crutch.

Like go home and cook dinner in her own kitchen, on her own two feet, breathing air that didn’t smell like antiseptic and fear.

Like answer a call from her sister Holly and finally say, “I need you.”

Holly arrived like a small storm of her own—loud, practical, compassionate. Within five minutes in the hospital, she knew every nurse by name and had one of the orderlies laughing so hard he had to wipe his eyes.

She moved into Mindy’s hospital room like she owned it, fluffing pillows, smuggling in better snacks, rationing out gossip from back home.

When Mindy was finally discharged and helped into the passenger seat of Holly’s car, the crisp New York air on her face felt like a second chance.

“You scared me,” Holly said quietly as they merged onto the highway, mindful of the weather even on a clear day now. “When the doctor called and said you’d been in a head-on collision… I almost threw up at work.”

“I scared myself,” Mindy admitted. “But hey, I’m hard to kill.”

“That so?” Holly glanced at her. “You were almost killed by your own husband and a nurse named Betsy. That’s not hard to kill, kid. That’s lucky.”

“Lucky they were idiots,” Mindy said, managing a crooked smile. “Lucky I needed water at exactly the right time. Lucky there are no cameras in the hospital, or Wayne might have kept his mouth shut forever.”

Holly blinked. “Wait. Cameras?”

Mindy grinned, teeth flashing. “I lied.”

“You what?”

“I told them there were hidden security cameras everywhere,” Mindy said. “Said our company installed them. That their whole little performance had been recorded. They panicked, confessed everything, and saved the cops a lot of work.”

Holly stared at her for a second, then burst out laughing.

“You,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “You absolute menace.”

“Bluffing is just car negotiation for people,” Mindy said. “The key is to look like you know you’re telling the truth.”

Holly shook her head. “You’re a fighter,” she said softly. “You always have been.”

“Some days,” Mindy replied, watching the road stretch ahead, “I’m tired of fighting.”

“Then don’t fight alone,” Holly said. “That’s what big sisters are for.”

Life didn’t turn romantic overnight.

It rarely does.

Mindy still had rehab appointments, physical therapy, days where everything hurt and she wondered if she would ever feel normal again. Nights when the sound of tires on wet pavement slammed her back into the crash and she woke sweating, heart racing.

But there were also small joys.

The first time she walked around the block without stopping.

The first time she stood at her kitchen counter and brewed coffee herself again, the smell filling her little Albany townhouse.

The first time she sat in a café downtown and realized she was looking at people, not cars, when she stared out the window.

And there was Dr. Rowan Hayes.

He started by checking on her as a doctor.

Then he showed up once with coffee and said it was “purely professional.”

Then he started showing up on purpose.

“Eight hours of sleep,” he reminded her once, smiling. “Walks in fresh air. And coffee with cake in good company. That was my prescription, remember?”

“It was very scientific,” she said. “Especially the cake.”

“I stand by my methods.”

He was careful, respectful of the messy remains of her trust. He never pushed. He listened more than he talked.

He did not promise her Florida or mansions or an escape from winter.

He promised exactly what he was: a man who had chosen medicine over everything else and still believed people could get better.

Including himself.

One clear cold evening, almost a year after the crash, Mindy walked alone past the stretch of I-87 where her car had been crushed against that SUV. She pulled off at the nearest exit, parked, and stood at the edge of the overpass, watching headlights stream by beneath her like rivers of light.

The highway did not remember her.

But she remembered it.

She stood there for a few minutes, breathing in the cold air, feeling her heart beat steady and strong in her chest.

Then she turned away.

She headed back to town, back to her small American life with its bills and rehab sessions and slow-blooming new love and the quiet knowledge that she had walked through something dark and come out carrying her own light.

Sometimes, she still thought about the moment she opened her eyes in the hospital and thought, I’m still alive.

It had been enough then.

It was more than enough now.

Because she wasn’t just alive.

She was awake.