Free Summer's Song: Pine Point, Book 1 by Allie Boniface

After standing in the sun for nearly twenty minutes, though, her throat felt parched, and perspiration slid from her neck to the small of her back. One policeman took down plate numbers. The other walked over to her. She didn’t recognize him.
    “You the one that called this in?”
    She nodded. “I was following the—” She pointed with a shaky finger. “The red car. Actually, it pulled out in front of me. I didn’t see what happened. I didn’t even see the truck coming from the other direction.”
    The officer flipped open a notepad and began to write. Her name? Address? Details of what she’d witnessed? Summer answered his questions as best she could and tried to avert her eyes as the medics pulled the unconscious driver from the truck’s wreckage and loaded him into the waiting ambulance.
    “Are they going to be okay?”
    The officer glanced behind him. “Well, it’s a nasty accident. Looks like the truck driver took the steering wheel and the windshield pretty good with his face. Couple broken ribs and a fractured nose, probably. Maybe a concussion too. Good thing you were following. They might have been out here for a while before anyone else came along.”
    Summer tried to nod. Right now she couldn’t feel glad about that. All she wanted was to go back to the motel and get on with the rest of her day. She didn’t have a strong stomach for blood. Or car accidents. “Do you need me for anything else?”
    He shook his head. “Don’t think so. I have your phone number, anyway, just in case.” A yell from one of the other men interrupted him, and she turned away.
    Summer wiped sweaty palms on her shorts and reached for her car door. Then she stopped. The man, the one who had yelled, jogged over to where the policeman stood. Dressed in his standard-issue blue shirt and pants, he looked like one of the many volunteer firefighters and medical technicians in town. Yet something about the way he crossed his arms and cocked his head made her squint. Hard. Then he opened his mouth and spoke.
    “Dammit, it’s Lonnie Perkins in the car. I went to school with him. He’s banged up bad.”
    Lightning bolts jumped from the sky into Summer’s skin. For an instant, the sunlight bouncing off the pavement distorted her view, but it didn’t matter. The tugging in her heart knew, if her eyes weren’t certain. Gabe Roberts— her Gabe Roberts, dark-haired and square-jawed, the boy she’d fallen in love with a lifetime ago—stood mere yards away. The pavement tilted beneath her feet. Her throat closed up. She stood there in the heat, frozen. I don’t—I can’t—
    Gabe glanced past the policeman’s shoulder and saw her. “Summer?”
    She could only stand there and stare.
    He ran the back of one hand across his brow. “Well, hi there.” Three words rolled off his tongue, and a decade unfolded in a heartbeat.
    “Hi.”
    He walked toward her with an uncertain smile, and for a minute she stood again in the sickly yellow light of Lou’s Fifty Flavors ice cream stand as a brash teenage Gabe crossed the parking lot with his eyes on her. Hi there . He’d said the same two words back then, and she hadn’t heard anything else the rest of the night.
    “Welcome home.” Something dark moved across his face, a shadow of something she imagined he saw on hers as well. “Sorry it’s under such lousy circumstances.”
    Home. Is that where I am? Summer felt more like she’d tumbled down the rabbit hole, flown up to the moon, vanished into another dimension where everything upside down and backwards was now normal. She wondered if she were hallucinating, or if the accident had thrown her into shock. After two or three years, she’d learned to put away the hurt of losing Gabe. And after two or three more, she’d forced herself to forget about him and move on. Only one scrapbook sat on a shelf back in her apartment, with pictures of their summer together and a few melancholy poems she’d scribbled when her father sent her