Leela was awake.
Her eyes were huge in the dim cab, her curls damp with sweat where the jacket had slipped. “Daddy?”
“I’m okay,” he said immediately, because her voice had fear in it. “I’m okay, sweetheart.”
She looked past him at the stranger. The woman stood hunched in the rain, one hand gripping the door frame, shaking so hard her teeth clicked.
“Is she hurt?” Leela asked.
“Yes.” Arav forced calm into his voice. “And we’re going to help her.”
He got a towel from the floorboard, but the thing was half oily from work and only barely dry. Useless. He cursed under his breath, then pulled off his own heavier overshirt and handed it to the woman.
“Here.”
She looked at it, then at him, as if she no longer trusted her own understanding of the world.
“You need to get out of those clothes,” he said. Then, seeing the vulnerability flash across her face, he added quickly, “I’ll turn around. I’ll stand outside if you want. My daughter’s here. You’ve got privacy.”
Something in her expression broke then—not into fear, but into raw relief so deep it looked like pain.
“Will you…” She swallowed hard. “Will you stay?”
It was such a fragile question that for a second he heard all the things inside it. Not desire. Not impropriety. Just the terror of a person who had nearly gone under and wasn’t sure she could bear to be left alone, even for one minute, even to change.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
He opened the passenger door and turned his back to the cab, using his body and the truck frame to shield what little privacy he could. Rain ran down the back of his neck. His ribs throbbed with every breath. Behind him he could hear the rustle of wet fabric, Leela’s quiet breathing, the woman’s unsteady attempts to move her hands.
“You can use my jacket too,” he said without turning. “It’s on the seat.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
When she was done, he got back in and saw she had wrapped herself in his jacket and overshirt like armor. Her wet clothes were bundled in a shaking fist. Leela, solemn and serious the way only children can be at strange moments, held out the teddy bear.
“For you,” she said.
The woman stared at the bear, then at the child, and something transformed in her face. She didn’t take it, but she reached out and touched one worn paw.
“Thank you,” she said again, and this time her voice almost failed.
The nearest hospital was in Briar Glen, twenty-three minutes away on a good night. In a storm, with two roads flooded and traffic lights out, it took nearly fifty.
No one said much.
The heater blasted. Leela eventually fell back asleep, curled against the door with the bear in her lap. The woman sat in the front passenger seat clutching the jacket around herself with both hands, staring out at the streaming darkness. Once or twice Arav looked over to make sure she was still conscious. Each time he found her watching the road as if it were a miracle.
At the hospital entrance, orderlies came out with a wheelchair after one look at her. She resisted it at first with the same stunned dignity of someone unaccustomed to helplessness, then winced when her knees gave and let them help her down.
Arav expected that to be the end of it. A thank-you, maybe. A statement for the police. He was already thinking about the truck, about Leela, about how late it was, about whether the garage would dock his pay if he missed the first hour of tomorrow’s shift after all this. That was his life: emergency folding quickly into logistics.
Then a black SUV slid up under the awning and three people came running through the rain.
A man in a dark suit. A woman in heels that sank into the wet pavement. Another man on a phone, shouting over the storm.
“Ms. Anand!”
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