Read Online Someone Like You by Barbara Bretton - Free Book Online

so sorry, love. What a terrible thing to happen.”
    Ty was his parents’ favorite son, the one who was expected to take over the farm and carry on their name. Their pain, the entire town’s pain, exploded all over Joely.
    “Every time I closed my eyes, the whole thing played out all over again inside my head, but I couldn’t change the way it ended,” she said as Sara listened quietly. “The cops brought me in for questioning after I was let out of the hospital, and I couldn’t stop crying. I kept thinking if only I’d taken the back way home . . . if only I’d made Mimi sit in the backseat . . . if only I hadn’t frozen right there in the intersection when I heard his Camaro coming—”
    Nothing sounded quite like a ’69 Camaro. The whole town knew the sound of Ty Porter’s car. She should have moved forward or made the turn. Anything. But she didn’t. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. All she could do was wait for fate to catch up with her.
    Ty had been traveling east on Main Street with his brother Zach in the passenger seat when he ran the stop sign and broadsided Mimi’s battered old van. By some miracle of the gods, neither she nor Mimi had been badly injured. However, Ty slammed full force into the steering column of his Camaro and died instantly.
    “And you want to know the worst part, Sara? While this whole hideous thing was happening all around me, I could still hear this ugly little voice in the back of my head bargaining with God, promising I’d go to church every day for the rest of my life if He would just let me leave for MIT the way I planned.”
    “You were young,” Sara said. If she thought less of Joely for the admission, she was too dear a friend to let it show. “We’re horribly selfish when we’re young. When you’re that young, you’re incapable of understanding mortality.”
    But it was more than that. She had seen a vision of her future buried in the grave along with Idle Point’s favorite son, and that vision overshadowed everything else. The relief she had felt when the autopsy report came back with the news that Ty’s blood alcohol level had been more than twice the legal limit still shamed her today, ten years after the fact.
     
    Kyoto, Japan
    William Bishop’s mobile died somewhere between Tokyo and Kyoto when it fell out of his jacket pocket and bounced off the stainless steel sink in the lav of the Shinkansen and cracked in two.
    He wasn’t a superstitious man by nature. He wasn’t one to knock wood or toss salt over his left shoulder. He would gladly walk under a ladder if that was the shortest route between points A and B, but the sight of the cracked mobile left him unsettled, as if the only thing tying him to home and hearth had been severed, and he was out there alone.
    “Bad luck,” his coworker, a middle-aged man named George, said as he reclaimed his seat. “But this is Japan. You’ll pick up a new one when we get to Kyoto.”
    He nodded. George’s advice sounded reasonable enough, but the sense of being cut adrift refused to go away. The world was a dangerous place. He had been in Phuket just weeks before the tsunami. He had lost friends in the World Trade Center towers. In the blink of an eye a man could lose everything he loved most, and he wouldn’t even know it was happening. He could be walking down a city street thinking about his next meeting or his next meal, not knowing that at that very moment love was slipping away.
    Those nightly phone calls might not mean as much to Joely or Annabelle, but they were his lifeline. Knowing they were safe and well made the time spent apart more endurable.
    Had he ever told Joely as much? He wasn’t sure. He tended to censor things like that with her. She wasn’t a sentimental sort, not at all the type of woman who grew tearyeyed over an armful of red roses or treacly greeting cards. Early on he had believed it was her scientific training that made her such a creature of the mind, and she had