Part 2
### Chapter 1: Chapter 1
Hitting someone with your car is probably the least recommended way to meet the love of our life. So, please, don’t hit attractive strangers with your car.
This book is a romantic comedy, not a life guide :)
The Accident was born from one ridiculous question:
What if the worst day of someone’s life accidentally became the beginning of the best one?
Tess Calloway is having the worst week of her life.
Her boyfriend dumps her by text. She cries behind the wheel. Then she accidentally hits a man with her car.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the man survives.
As if that wasn't bad enough... he's a lawyer.
Now Tess is desperately trying to hide one very inconvenient truth, while Sebastian Ashbury seems far more interested in making her life complicated than pressing charges.
Between impossible favors, terrible lies, one suspiciously judgmental life-size Yoda, and enough awkward chemistry to qualify as a public hazard, keeping her secret might be the hardest thing she's ever done.
Because sometimes the road to love starts with a wrong turn.
Complete Chapters 24
Rating 4.9 ( 27 reviews ) Age Rating 16+
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Right of Way
Tess Calloway had cried in worse places. The break room at St. Agnes, twice. The supply closet, once, while still holding a box of gauze she never did end up using. The parking garage, regularly, in the specific way that didn’t count if no one saw it.
This felt, on some level, like an upgrade. The car had a radio she could turn up loud enough to cover the crying and the open-mouthed breathing that came with a stuffed-up nose, so that none of it would be audible — not that there was anyone around to hear it.
She was getting ready for a twelve-hour shift. It was eleven at night, and before she’d left the house she’d texted Mike.
He turned thirty tomorrow, and she had the perfect gift waiting in her backseat: a life-size, one-to-one scale Yoda statue. Mike loved anything Star Wars — Jedi, lightsabers, the whole sprawling fantasy of it — with the focused, unembarrassed devotion of a man who had simply decided, somewhere around age nine, that this was who he was going to be.
It was a gift she had driven four hours for. That didn’t count the two hours she’d already spent before that, chasing down a listing that promised a full-size Yoda and turned out, on arrival, to be a full-size Gollum — sickly, crouched, holding out one clawed hand and asking, unhelpfully, for my precious. She’d had a small private crisis in a stranger’s driveway, recalculated, found a second listing forty-five minutes away, and gotten home close to one in the morning with an actual Yoda strapped into her backseat like the smallest, greenest passenger she’d ever transported.
So she had every reason in the world to be happy. She’d texted him: Hey. Tomorrow’s the big day. How do you want to celebrate? Because I have a BIG surprise for you. Kisses.
She was at a red light when she heard the phone. One ping. She picked it up off the passenger seat and read it.
I think we need to take a break. I just don’t think this is working anymore. It’s not your fault.
She read it three times, still processing it, when the car behind her started honking. She put the phone down — threw it, really, more than put it — and started driving, already composing the reply in her head. Why. What happened. We had dinner last night and it was perfect.
That was the detail she kept circling back to.
For one disorienting second she wondered if he’d sent it to the wrong person — some mix-up of names in his contacts, some other woman entirely — and then realized the alternative was somehow worse, because wrong person meant another relationship , and that thought didn’t sit any better than the first one. So if it wasn’t a mistake, what was it?
She thought about the year they’d had. How sweet he’d been — remembering her coffee order, texting to make sure she’d eaten on long shifts. He worked in IT, kept odd hours himself, never once complained about hers. Never once complained about the smell of hospital that came home with her on her clothes either. Such a good guy.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand, which did nothing, because her hand was also wet. She’d apparently been crying for longer than she’d noticed.
The road out past the reservoir was unlit and empty at eleven at night, which was usually the appeal — no traffic, no other cars to witness a twenty-four-year-old woman sobbing in motion — except tonight it meant nothing to catch her attention except the radio and her own thoughts, which were doing laps.
I just don’t think this is working anymore.
A sound that her brain, in the half-second it had to process it, filed under not pothole — too soft, too wrong-shaped — and then the car jolted and something rolled off the hood and Tess slammed the brakes so hard her seatbelt cut into her collarbone and the radio kept playing, cheerfully, as if nothing had happened.
She sat there for one full second doing absolutely nothing, which was not a second she was proud of later.
He was on the asphalt, on his side, in running shorts and one shoe, the other shoe sitting in the road eight feet away. Dark hair. Tall, even folded up wrong like that. Not moving.
“Oh my God,” she said, to no one, to the empty road, to the universe. “Oh my God, oh my God—”
She dropped to her knees beside him, and the part of her brain that had spent six years becoming a nurse elbowed the part of her brain that was currently having a breakdown and said, with some authority, assess the patient.
Airway — open, breathing, fast and shallow but there. Pulse — present, quick. No blood she could see except a shallow scrape along his temple, already swelling into something purple. His right leg sat at an angle that legs did not naturally sit at.
“Hey,” she said, hands hovering over him without quite landing, the way you hover over something you’re afraid to break further. “Hey, can you hear me?”
She should call an ambulance. She knew this with total clarity, the way she knew her own name, the way she knew the dosage for adult ibuprofen.
What she did instead — and she would spend a significant portion of the next several weeks trying to reconstruct the exact logic that got her here — was decide, with the specific panic-logic of someone who worked twelve-hour shifts surrounded by the consequences of bad decisions, that the fastest and safest thing was to put him in her car and drive him to St. Agnes herself, where she knew the doctors, where she knew the process, where she would not have to stand on a dark road waiting twenty minutes for a siren while a stranger’s leg sat at an angle legs did not sit at.
This was, on reflection, not actually faster. It was also, on reflection, the moment everything else became inevitable.
Getting a six-foot-something unconscious man into a sedan by herself was not a skill she’d been taught in nursing school, but adrenaline made up for a great deal of this missing skill. She got him into the backseat at an angle that probably wasn’t ideal for a possible spinal injury, made the executive decision that she would deal with that guilt later, and drove to the hospital faster than she had ever driven anything in her life.
It wasn’t, she reasoned, like she was going to hit someone else tonight. There was a limit. There had to be a limit.
“You’re fine,” she told him, or told herself, or told the empty passenger seat. “You’re going to be fine. I’m a nurse. This is — this is actually a great place for this to have happened. Statistically.”
He did not respond to this, which was for the best, because it was not a good sentence.
St. Agnes at eleven-forty was the version of busy that looked calm from the outside and was, underneath, a controlled emergency. Tess pulled up to the ambulance bay, threw the car into park at an angle that would earn her a parking violation if anyone official noticed, and ran inside shouting words that got people moving — trauma, unconscious, possible fracture, possible head injury — and within ninety seconds there were four people around her car and a gurney and the specific organized chaos of people who did this for a living.
“Tess?” Marisol, from triage, blinking at her. “What happened, what is this—”
The words came out before she’d decided to say them, fast and flat and final, the way a lie sounds when it arrives ahead of the thought that produced it.
“On the road. Out by the reservoir. I was driving here and I found him like this.”
It wasn’t, strictly, untrue. She had found him. The part where she’d found him because her car had found him first was a detail that stayed in her mouth, behind her teeth.
“Okay.” Marisol was already moving, already calling for Dr. Madina, already not particularly interested in the philosophy of the sentence Tess had just produced. “Okay, let’s get him in.”
Tess stood in the bay for a moment, hands shaking, watching them wheel him through the doors, and then did the only thing that made sense to her, which was to follow.
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### Chapter 2: Chapter 2
He had a tibia fracture, clean enough to set without surgery, a concussion that the CT scan said was concerning but not catastrophic, and a collection of scrapes that made him look considerably worse than he apparently was, medically speaking. No internal bleeding. No spinal damage, which was the piece of news that made Tess want to jump up and shout, quietly, inside her own skull, where no one could see how disproportionate the relief was.
His name, according to the wallet another nurse had pulled from his running shorts, was Sebastian Ashbury.
She said it a few times, quietly, to the dark room, like saying a stranger’s name enough times might explain the math of how he’d ended up belonging to her, briefly, by accident.
Tess knew because she was watching the clock, because she had been watching everything — his chest rising, the monitor, the door, the clock — for three hours, in the specific vigil of someone keeping watch over a thing they’d broken.
His eyes opened. Found the ceiling. Found, eventually, her. They were blue, a very dark blue, the kind that looked almost black until the light caught it, an interesting contrast against the dark hair.
He looked at her for a long moment with the unfocused, deeply confused expression of a man whose last clear memory was probably a streetlight, possibly a stride count, and definitely not a hospital room.
“Hi,” Tess said, standing up too fast, knocking the chair back an inch. “Hey. You’re okay. You’re in the hospital, you had an accident, you’re going to be fine—”
His voice was rough, like it hadn’t been used in a while, even though it had only been a matter of hours.
The truthful answer — I’m the person who hit you with my car and then lied about it to my coworkers — did not, under any reasonable interpretation, qualify as a good thing to say to a man with a head injury.
“I’m Tess,” she said instead. “I found you. On the road.”
True. Technically. A sentence that would hold up, if pressed, in a court of extremely generous law.
He considered this with the slow, careful focus of someone whose brain was currently operating at reduced bandwidth.
“I had a really bad few seconds there,” he said, “where I thought maybe I had amnesia. And you were my wife. Or something. That would’ve been a lot to wake up to.”
“You have a wife?” she asked, before she could stop herself, then immediately regretted it, because it was, strictly speaking, none of her business. Except that if he had someone, that was one more person who was eventually going to want to know exactly what had happened to him.
“I don’t think I do,” he agreed, with the philosophical calm of a man on excellent painkillers. “I’d remember that. Probably.”
“You’re sure you’re not my wife, though.”
“Shame,” he said, and closed his eyes again, already half back under, already smiling slightly in a way that Tess would spend a great deal of time, in the coming days, trying very hard not to think about. “You seem like you’d have been a good one.”
He was asleep again before she could decide whether that sentence required a response.
Tess sat back down in the chair, picked the blanket up off the floor where it had slid, and looked at Sebastian Ashbury’s sleeping, scraped-up, completely unaware face for a long time.
This , she thought, with the particular clarity of someone three hours into a lie, is going to be a problem.
She had no idea, yet, exactly how right she was.
She stayed in the chair until she fell asleep too.
She was woken by a police officer — bored-looking, clipboard under one arm, the specific bureaucratic boredom of a man on his fourth report of the shift — who wanted to know whether the patient in this room had regained consciousness.
The officer pulled out a small notebook and clicked his pen.
Tess Calloway. I found him. On the road… I’m a nurse here.”
The officer nodded, unbothered, writing something down.
It came out wrong both times, half a second apart, and she watched the officer’s pen pause. It hadn’t occurred to her until that exact moment — not once, not driving to the hospital, not in the three hours she’d spent watching a monitor beep — that he might want to see the car. A car that she’d moved it to the employee lot without thinking.
“I was in a taxi when I found him,” she said. “Near the reservoir.”
The officer wrote that down too, carefully, in the unhurried handwriting of a man who had heard a thousand versions of a thousand stories and was professionally unmoved by all of them.
“All right.” He pulled a card out of his breast pocket and held it out to her. “Can you give him this when he wakes up? We’ll need to talk to him.”
“About the hit-and-run,” the officer said. “We take those very seriously.”
She sat on the edge of her chair for the better part of half an hour after he left before it seemed like a reasonable time to slip out and go check on the state of her car.
It was bad. Bad, bad, bad. A headlight, shattered. A dent along the bumper that did not require a medical degree to read as this car hit something, recently, at speed.
She got in, drove home faster than was strictly legal for someone who had already hit one pedestrian that week, and put the car in the garage, where it would stay, she decided, indefinitely, possibly until she died.
Inside, she paced. The kitchen, the hallway, back to the kitchen. She made coffee she had no intention of drinking. She paced some more.
Mike was already more than enough to deal with. At some point she remembered she still needed her badge, left in the car, and went out to the garage to get it.
The headlight greeted her first — still shattered, still incriminating, sitting there in the dim light like evidence she hadn’t found a way to get rid of yet. And then, behind it, strapped into the backseat exactly where she’d left him: the Yoda. Full-size, green, serenely unbothered by any of this, holding his little wooden cane and looking, in the dim light, faintly judgmental.
“Saved, will I be?” she asked him, in her best attempt at the voice, mostly because there was no one else in the garage to ask.
She called a taxi and went back to the hospital.
When she walked into the room, he was awake. He looked at her.
“Hey, wife-who-isn’t-my-wife,” he said, and let his head fall back against the pillow.
“You were in an accident.” A pause, the kind she hadn’t quite meant to leave. “Do you remember anything?”
“What car?” she asked, half a second too fast.
He looked at her — really looked, careful, a focused look of someone whose head injury had apparently not affected his ability to notice when a question landed wrong.
“Don’t know the color. Dark, I think.” A beat. “But I remember the plate.”
She felt the floor tilt, very slightly, under her chair.
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