For a moment, I couldn’t move. My youngest brother stood on our porch, clutching our mother’s old phone as though it were something precious enough to break. And in a way, it was. Our mother had been gone for almost three years. Her voice was a memory I carried into every difficult morning. Her photographs were tucked inside a drawer beside my bed.
And the phone in my brother’s trembling hands was the last thing she’d used to call us before the accident that took her life. I hadn’t turned it on in months. I didn’t even know it still worked. But my brother, Noah, was staring at me with an expression that made my stomach tighten. “Sis,” he called again. “Mom knew.”
Behind me, Richard Whitmore stood beside the wreckage of his expensive iron gates. His face had lost its color. The truck driver was speaking with the county inspectors, while Tyler sat on the curb, trembling beneath the blanket a neighbor had brought him. The smell of burned rubber hung over the street.
Richard’s marble fountain lay in pieces.
And my old Toyota, the car he’d mocked only minutes earlier, was still parked beside the road with its damaged bumper.
Everything had happened so quickly.
