Page 37 of You'll Never Know
Chapter 19
BAILEY
I stare at Ben, wordless. The last person on earth I want to talk about right now is Evelyn Nash. It’s a name that fills me with an unspeakable amount of sorrow and an equal amount of rage. It was Evelyn Nash who sliced out of the fog doing sixty in her luxury BMW X7 and killed my family. She ran straight through a stop sign and obliterated my car along with hers. And she did it while driving drunk.
Not a day has passed since the wreck I don’t think of Evelyn Nash. She haunts my waking hours like a ghost. I see what she’s stolen from me everywhere I look—in the dust coating the family pictures I took off the walls and piled in the corner of the living room face down. In the way Noah’s swing hangs slack and still in the backyard. In the silence of my house where nothing ever changes unless I change it. All these holes punched into the fabric of my life by Evelyn Nash that will never close.
Why did you do it? Why did you get behind the wheel drunk?
Didn’t you know how dangerous that was? Did you even care?
Do you know what you’ve taken from me? Do you know what you’ve done?
These are the questions I want to ask her. I want to sit there and listen as she tries to justify herself, and then I want to crack open mysternum, dig out my pain, and hand it to her black and dripping.Here, take it. This belongs to you. I want her to hurt like I hurt. I want her to suffer. Too bad she never will.
Out of the four of us involved in the wreck, I’m the only one who survived. Like Ben after his construction accident, I was intubated and placed into a medically induced coma. But unlike Ben, mine wasn’t due to a brain injury. Besides my lacerated spleen, I had a severely punctured lung. I nearly drowned in a lake of my own blood on the way to the hospital. When I woke two weeks later, panting and sick, gasping for my child and husband, my first question after Ben told me what happened was: “Who hit us?”
“Evelyn Nash,” he’d replied, his voice thick through the tears.
I didn’t know the name, didn’t have a clue who she was.
As I healed, I chased her down rabbit trails on Google. Evelyn Nash was the daughter of Donald Nash, one of Seattle’s business elites. A plum-cheeked CEO already on his third wife—a serious-looking woman I saw dabbing her eyes next to him in the pictures of Evelyn’s funeral. Donald had thinning hair and a Crest White Strip smile. He looked like the kind of guy who ate tender cuts of steak for dinner and drank expensive bottles of wine while complaining about cost-of-living raises for his minimum-wage employees.
I knew his type; I dealt with executives like him at every step of my career. A man whose favorite topic was himself. A high-cholesterol corporate warrior who’d go on for hours telling you about his golf swing and yacht club or any one of his five houses. There were numerous clips of him on the web doing exactly that. It seemed no topic was off limits except for his daughter.
On the rare occasion someone in the press asked a question about Evelyn even before her death, he shut down.How was Hawaii, Mr. Nash? I saw you took your daughter.Conversation over.
I studied those clips relentlessly. I wanted to understand her. I wanted to know who this woman was who’d destroyed all I’d helddear. She was a waifish woman with a penchant for tight ponytails and ill-fitting dresses who kept her gaze on her shoes in public and carried all the sparkle of a shadow. She had the kind of face that belonged in an anti-depression commercial. One of those women who couldn’t bear to look out the window before she took the miracle pill: Sad, puppy dog eyes. Lips tied in a pout. Hair that was limp and dull.
After I got out of the hospital, I received a series of settlement offers from Donald Nash, which I tore up. I didn’t want to think about the Nashes every time I went to the grocery store or paid a utility bill. I didn’t want another reason for Evelyn to take up space in my brain. But more than that, I didn’t want the Nashes to think my family had a price. There was no amount of money I’d accept to pacify their guilt.
Money.
As if that could ever buy me happiness. Ethan and Noahweremy happiness; all I ever needed was them. In the end, I’d directed the Nash estate to make a contribution to Mothers Against Drunk Driving in Ethan and Noah’s memory. I couldn’t do anything about my loss, but I figured I might be able to help prevent others. It was the least I could do, and far more than I’d ever done with my life before the wreck.
After that, I tried to forget Evelyn, to forget the Nashes altogether.
Which is why I stiffen the second Ben utters her name.
I clench my teeth and shake my head. “Ben, don’t.”
He leans forward and his knee pops. “We’re talking about her whether you like it or not.”
I move to stand. I won’t—can’t—talk about her. Especially not now. Not today.
“Sit down!”
I freeze. Ben never yells. He’s usually calm and soft-spoken. A steady hand.
I settle back into the couch.
“I’m not doing this with you anymore, Bailey! You’ve avoidedtalking about her for too long.” He waves his hands at the room, at all the disarray and clutter. “All of this is because you’ve never dealt with what happened. You’ve never faced it.” His voice softens. “Look, I can’t pretend to understand what you’ve been through, but you need a purpose, and this”—he gestures at the room again—“is not purpose. It’s the opposite. You don’t go anywhere. You don’t talk to anyone. You don’t callme. You’re supposed to callme, Bay. I’m your brother. It’s my job to help you.”
You can’t help,I think miserably.No one can.
His eyes linger on mine, lightning still crackling at the edges. “I get it, though. And I don’t blame you. No one should ever have to deal with something like this. But like it or not, this is your reality. You have to face it one way or another.”
The pills sing to me from the table. I cross my arms and sink deeper into the cushion. “And how is talking about Evelyn Nash supposed to help me do that?”
