The house was a neat, pale-yellow two-story on a quiet street across town.
I knocked.
When the door opened, I immediately recognized her.
The same woman from the footage. Her coat was unbuttoned now.
She saw my face—and froze.
“Are you Amanda?” I asked.
She nodded once.
“Then you know why I’m here.”
She stepped back from the doorway—not quite inviting me in, but no longer stopping me.
I walked inside.
She led me to a small sitting room. We sat across from each other in silence for nearly a minute.
I watched her hands. She watched mine.
Finally, I spoke.
“Who are you?”
She took a breath.
“I was going to be Thomas’s wife,” she said. “We were engaged. Six weeks from the wedding when it happened… the accident.”
That caught me completely off guard.
“Dad never mentioned that.”
“Thomas never told you a lot of things, I suppose,” she said quietly.
Then she began to talk.
For twenty minutes, she spoke—and in that time, she rearranged thirty years of my life.
Dad had been driving that day.
My father’s car.
My father had been in the passenger seat. My mother had been in the back.
They had been on their way to meet Amanda at the venue they had chosen for the wedding reception.
A sharp curve on a back road had caused the car to lose traction and veer off.
Thomas had been thrown clear.
My parents hadn’t.
“He called me from the hospital,” Amanda said, her gaze fixed downward. “He was barely coherent. He kept saying it was his fault. That he’d taken the turn too fast. That he should’ve known better.”
“Was it Dad’s fault?”
She shook her head slightly.
“The investigation found evidence of brake failure. The brakes had been compromised before anyone got into the car. Thomas wasn’t speeding. He hadn’t been drinking. The mechanic said there was likely nothing he could’ve done.”
“But he never believed that,” I said.
It wasn’t a question.
“Never,” she replied. “He held onto every ‘if’ he could find. If I hadn’t pushed for that road. If I’d waited. If I’d driven slower. No one could reach him.”
