Free Blackberry Summer by RaeAnne Thayne

however inadvertent, but he couldn’t leave Claire. Not yet.
    “No, let’s get her into the ambulance. I promised her and her kids I’d stay with her.”
    Over the next few moments, he was forced to retractevery negative thought he’d had about the paramedics as he watched their quick, efficient efforts to extract her safely from the vehicle. But it still seemed like a lifetime before she was finally loaded onto the gurney and they began to wade back through the icy water.
    The trickiest part—besides making his painstaking way through the water with legs that no longer felt attached to his hips—was safely maneuvering the rack up the slick, snow-covered slope from the water’s edge to the roadway. When they finally crested the top, one of the passenger doors opened and a moment later, Macy Bradford rushed to them, her face white and scared in the snow-filtered light of the headlights and her eyes trained only on Claire.
    “Mom!” she exclaimed.
    Claire’s eyelashes fluttered in the icy snowflakes as she tried to remain alert. “Macy. My brave girl.”
    “Are you okay?”
    “I will be. You and Owen and Jordie?”
    “I’m fine. We’re okay. Some people wanted to take us to the hospital, but I…we wanted to wait for you.”
    Claire had been through hell and back and she was bloody and broken. But when she still managed to muster a smile for her daughter and reach for the girl’s hand, Riley felt like something sharp and hard had just lodged against his heart.
    “We’ve got to get her inside so we can roll,” Claire’s cousin Doug said, not unkindly, and they pushed the gurney up into the back of the ambulance.
    Without warning, the moment the doors were closed behind her mother, Macy suddenly burst into noisy sobs. Even though Riley was exhausted and soakingwet, frozen to the bone, he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “She’s going to be okay, you hear me? She’ll be okay.”
    The girl drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “I was so scared.”
    “I know, honey. You’ve been a champ about this. Now we need to get you and the boys to the hospital. I’m going to see if I can round up another ambulance for you.”
    “We’ve got the boys safe and warm here. Do you want us to take them down the canyon to the hospital?”
    He looked up at the voice and found the woman he had seen on shore standing beside her big Suburban, along with the boy who had waded out to help him. “I’m Barbara Redmond. I work at the hospital E.R.”
    Riley considered his options. If the other accident was as serious as the paramedics had indicated, it might be a while before another ambulance crew could make it for the children. Transported in a private vehicle, the kids could already be in a treatment room at the E.R. at the small Hope’s Crossing Medical Center before the other crew could make it back up.
    “Thank you. That will help.”
    The people of Hope’s Crossing banded together in crisis situations, with everyone pitching in to help. He’d forgotten that in the years since he’d been gone. In some of the neighborhoods he worked in Oakland, accident victims faced a crapshoot, whether would-be rescuers would call for help or loot their pockets.
    Riley made sure the children were safely buckled and settled and watched the SUV slowly pull back ontothe road. Just as they made the first turn, he saw the brown and white of a Peak County sheriff’s vehicle pull to a stop.
    He estimated a half hour had passed since the accident, maybe an hour since he’d left the elementary school. For the first time in his life, he understood what people meant when they talked about living a lifetime in a few moments. He felt as if he’d aged at least twenty years since he sat and listened to the Spring Fling pageant with his older sister beside him.
    The cold sliced through his wet clothing and Riley fought shivers as he watched a figure climb from the sheriff’s department SUV. The sheriff himself, he realized. Evan