Chapter One

Leah Sunderland stared at her body, sprawled over the hood of her car, and all she could feel was numb. It didn’t feel like her body, seeing as how she stood on the curb a few feet away, though it was definitely her face spattered with blood under the mess of long brown hair.

Beside her, an elderly woman patted her on the arm. “Drunk drivers are the worst, aren’t they, my dear? You were so young.”

Leah pushed her thick, overlong bangs out of her eyes and just shook her head, still staring. “I don’t understand. What just happened?”

The woman cocked her head, gray curls bobbing. “Well, I’m no expert on traffic, but it looks like you had the green light, and he went ahead and plowed through anyhow. He hit you on the driver’s side at sixty miles per hour, and you not wearing your seatbelt….” The woman tsked at her.

“It was broken,” Leah mumbled, moving around her car. “I was going to get it fixed tomorrow.” It was an incredible streak of bad luck that Leah had, and the whole seatbelt thing seemed to be the icing on the cake, the latest in a long stream of things constantly going wrong in her life. “I guess it doesn’t matter now, does it?” She turned away from her sprawled body and mangled car, only to find she was facing the other mangled vehicle. Sad to say, the driver appeared to be fine, if not firmly drunk. The man staggered out of his car and shouted into a cell phone, his free hand pressed to his forehead.