Jake (California Dreamy) - By Rian Kelley Page 0,1

a step back and bent slightly at the waist to examine the extent of the damage.

Front tire, driver’s side. She’d known that before getting out. But the tire was a goner. It had already started to shred, rubber peeling away from the rim. Not good news.

She didn’t panic. She was a pro, now, at handling crisis situations. At saving herself. She’d had to do it at thirteen, when her mother, in one of her drunken stupors, had set fire to their home, and again at twenty-two, when she’d walked away from an abusive marriage. A blown tire in the middle of nowhere was an inconvenience. It wasn’t life-threatening.

Ivy lifted her chin and propped her hands on her hips. The wind blew drifts of sand over the hood and roof of the car, coating the black paint and the windshield. She felt it in her hair and knew she probably had a fine dusting of pale over mahogany. She gazed beyond the car, but there was no traffic coming from the west. She turned and looked east, the way she’d come. Nothing.

She had taken this two lane interchange on purpose. Less traffic meant swifter travel. She worked Sunday evenings at a job doing what she loved—respiratory therapist. Nights on the pod, as they called it, were no less busy than her days on the acute care unit at Children’s Hospital, but there was a hushed quality to them that soothed her. She worked a twelve hour shift, seven to seven, checking ventilators and coaching children through coughing and breathing exercises.

It was rewarding. And it had given Ivy her first flush of personal value.

She didn’t want to be late. At ten after four in the afternoon, that gave her an hour to get help and get on her way and almost two hours to finish the drive.

So she would slip out of her sandals and into her running shoes and trek however many miles to a call box. In California, that could be as much as seven miles. She’d run five that morning.

Ivy opened the back hatch of the car and pulled the cardboard box toward her. She kept supplies in here—oil, coolant, jumper cables, a flashlight. She tore off a flap and then searched for a black Sharpie, which she found pushed to the back of the glove compartment. ‘Call police,’ she wrote in big block letters and then taped the sign to the back window. Next, she wrote a note on the back of a grocery receipt: ‘Walking west to call box.’ She slipped this on the dash, in front of the steering wheel, and then dug her running shoes out of her bag in the back seat.

Running was a privilege. Holly wasn’t able to, not yet. Her sister, who had run track in high school—mostly so that she had a reason to be out of the house—and then spent the past ten years competing in long distance races and always placed, was no longer able to run. She was still relearning to walk. Ivy blinked away the first sheen of tears before they could overwhelm her. Holly had worked relentlessly for the past nineteen months to get her mobility back, and yesterday the doctor had said that she was at the halfway point. He’d said that three months ago, too. He’d warned them from the beginning that Holly could hit a brick wall anywhere along the way. It was inevitable. And Ivy worried that maybe that time was now.

Ivy was in the car with Holly the night their lives had changed forever again. She remembered everything about the crash. How they had left the restaurant laughing and it had felt so good after such a long silence—Ivy’s fault for refusing to speak to her sister for nearly three years. They had gotten on the freeway, determined to catch the sunset while sitting on the beach sipping margaritas. A celebration and a promise not to let anything—or anyone—come between them again.

And then, in the gathering dusk, a car had come barreling toward them. The wrong way on the freeway. Ivy remembered seeing the flashing bar of police lights behind it. And how those colors had seemed to merge and shatter on impact. But she never lost consciousness. For a few moments, while her mind and body absorbed the shock of the crash, all had gone dark. But she was still able to hear—Holly’s gasps shuddering into a low groan and then into silence.

She had used her medical training to keep