Locking the glass display, Dev started out the door. “Frank!”
Frank paused at the curb, then started across the street.
“Frank—wait a minute.” Dev started after him, caught behind a family moseying down the sidewalk with a herd of small, sticky children holding balloons that were bobbing crazily in the breeze at adult eye level.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a dark sedan pull slowly from the curb at the far end of the block. As it drew closer, he caught a glimpse of a husky driver holding a cell phone at his ear and the steering wheel with his other hand.
The balloons bobbled back into Dev’s line of vision just as the sedan suddenly swerved and lurched forward.
A sudden premonition sank its talons into his heart. “Frank! Look out!”
Oblivious, Frank kept walking.
Someone screamed. Stragglers in the street scattered, gripping the hands of small children as they threw themselves out of the way.
Apparently startled by the motion rather than the noise, Frank spun around and started to run.
But it was too late.
The car caught him broadside. His body tumbled in the air as if in slow motion, then landed with a sickening thud and the sound of fracturing bone on the street, a good twenty feet from impact.
People shouted. The scene was now a blur of color and movement as the vehicle screeched around the next corner on two wheels and rocketed out of sight.
Dev started running. Even as his mind automatically clicked into emergency mode, his heart wrenched with grief for an oldman who couldn’t possibly sustain injuries from that kind of impact and survive.
He started to pray.
“I failed. I could’ve saved him, but I failed,” Dev ground out, his elbows propped on his thighs and his face buried in his hands.
Beth rested a hand on his back, wishing he would sit up and make eye contact.
When she’d arrived in the E.R. waiting room he’d been sitting alone, bent over his knees with his fists clenched behind his head. Lost in his own world, he hadn’t acknowledged her greeting or her presence for a good twenty minutes.
Whether he was praying or reliving Frank’s accident she couldn’t guess.
But then he’d straightened up in his chair. His guilt and grief were so palpable that it seemed the whole room was filled with it.
“He’s lucky to have a good friend like you, Dev. You can be supportive while he recovers in the hospital. And hewillrecover. You can help him even more once he’s released.”
“He’slucky?Someone else could’ve moved faster. Done the right thing.”
“No one else even tried. They were all running scared. “
“As for being a good friend? I can’t evenrelateto civilian life. Not anymore.”
With a sudden flash of clarity, she realized this was not just about the gravely wounded man who’d been in surgery for almost two hours now, facing a battle for his life.
She placed her hand over his and squeezed gently. “You tried to warn him. You tried to get there in time. It wasn’t possible for anyone to do better. He’s in God’s hands now.”
“God’s hands.” Dev’s voice was low and bitter. “Where was God whenever I prayed desperately for someone’s life? When that hit-and-run driver headed for Frank and stepped on the gas instead of the brakes? Where was God when that Afghan mother and her two kids—”
He broke off sharply and leaned his head against the wall above his chair, his face stricken.
Beth’s heart twisted at the depth of pain he felt, far beyond that of any battle wound or surgery, though he’d endured those as well. She let the silence between them lengthen, letting him think. Hoping he might start talking again.
But he stared up at the ceiling as if she weren’t there, one minute after another.
“Tell me,” she said quietly.
