Chapter 3 The Girl From the River

Griffin POV

Sabine's hand grabbed my wrist the second I reached her bed, her grip stronger than it should have been for someone who couldn't feel her own legs.

"It was her." Her voice was hoarse, wrecked from crying, but her eyes were sharp, locked on mine like she needed me to understand before anyone else walked in. "Margot was arguing with me before the crash. About the wedding. She grabbed the wheel."

The words hit me like a fist to the chest.

"She grabbed it?"

"I didn't want to believe it either." Sabine's chin trembled. "But I felt the car jerk right before we went over. I felt her hand pull us toward the rail."

I stood there holding her hand, and something in me that had been barely standing for the last hour finally cracked all the way through.

I have known exactly one true thing since I was six years old. That somebody saved my life once, in a river that should have taken it, and I have spent every year since trying to be worth that.

It was the summer my parents took us to my grandfather's lake house, back before Sabine and I were officially anything, back when we were just two families who vacationed together every July. I was six. I couldn't swim, not really, and I went out past the dock because some other kid dared me to, and the current under that water was faster than it looked from the shore.

I remember going under. I remember the sound disappearing, the way everything goes quiet underwater, like the world forgets you're there. I remember thinking, very calmly, the way only a child can think calmly about dying, that I was going to stay under that water forever.

Then a hand grabbed my arm and pulled.

I broke the surface coughing, and there was a girl beside me, small and shaking and holding onto me like she'd decided I was hers to save. My mother screamed something from the shore. My father was already wading in. And the girl who pulled me out, hair plastered to her face, eyes wide with fear she hadn't had time to feel yet, was Sabine.

At least, that's what I have always believed, because that's what everyone told me afterward. My mother said it. My father said it. Sabine's mother said it, wrapping her in a towel and praising her for being so brave. I was six. I didn't argue with grown-ups. I just held onto the memory the way you hold onto the first real proof that you matter to somebody, and I built the next twenty years of my life around it.

I have loved Sabine since before I understood what love was. Some of it was gratitude that never stopped growing. Some of it was the simple truth that she was easy to love, warm and soft and always turned toward me as a flower turned toward light. I asked her to marry me because some part of me still believed I owed her everything, including my whole future.

And now she was telling me that her sister had grabbed the wheel and tried to kill her.

"She's always been jealous of me." Sabine's voice dropped lower, like she hated saying it. "You know she has. Since we were kids. I never wanted to believe she'd do something like this, but Griffin, I felt her hand."

I didn't answer her. I couldn't. My whole body had gone numb in the exact way it goes numb right before real anger arrives, the calm before something breaks.

I walked out of that room like I was somebody else, someone who wasn't shaking, someone who had already decided everything before he understood any of it.

Margot was still standing in the hallway exactly where I'd left her, arms wrapped around herself, looking small in a way I had never once seen her look small. Some old part of me, some part that used to notice the way she laughed at things nobody else found funny, wanted to ask if she was okay.

I didn't listen to that part.

"She told me everything," I said, and my voice came out flat and cold, a voice I didn't recognize as mine. "You grabbed the wheel."

Margot's face went white. "That's not what happened. I don't know why she'd say that, but I never,"

"Stop." The word came out sharp enough that a nurse two doors down glanced up. I didn't care. "You know what that girl did for me. You've heard the story a hundred times at every family dinner we've ever had. She pulled me out of a river when I was six years old and about to drown, and I have spent my whole life trying to be someone worth that. And you just tried to take her out of this world the same way she once kept me in it."

"Griffin, please, just listen,"

"No." My hands were shaking now, and I let them. "You don't get to explain this away. She is the only reason I am alive, and you just put her in a bed she might never leave. You destroyed the one person who ever actually saved me, and I don't think you even understand what that means, because you've never had to be grateful for anything in your whole life."

Something flashed across Margot's face when I said that. Not guilt. Something else, something closer to disbelief, like I had said a piece of a puzzle that didn't fit anywhere in the picture she was holding.

"Griffin." Her voice went strange, quiet, careful, like she was choosing each word with both hands. "What exactly do you think happened at that lake?"

"I know what happened."

"Do you?" She took one step closer, and there was something in her eyes now that hadn't been there a second ago, something that looked almost like fear, but not fear of me.

"Because I was at that lake too," she said. "I was twelve. And I have spent eighteen years wondering why nobody ever remembered that it was me who went in after you, not her."