“Why now?” I choked out, tears finally spilling over my eyelashes and dripping down my cheeks. “Why keep it buried for thirteen years and then suddenly tell you on a Tuesday night? And why hide it from me?”
Alan looked away for a brief second, swallowing hard as if the next words were physical weight he had to force out of his mouth. “Because she didn’t just remember the crash,” he whispered, meeting my gaze again with a look of profound sorrow. “She remembered the person who caused it.”
Read the next page to discover the shocking secret Iris revealed about the night of the accident.
Part 3: The Shadow on the Highway
The air in our bedroom suddenly felt far too thin to breathe. I pulled my hands back from Alan’s grip, wrapping my arms around my chest as if trying to hold myself together against an invisible blow. The police report had explicitly stated that no other vehicles were involved in the wreck that killed her family.
“What do you mean, the person who caused it?” I asked, my pulse pounding loudly in my ears. “The police investigation was closed over a decade ago. It was classified as a single-car accident due to severe weather conditions. There were no other tire tracks, no paint transfers, nothing.”
Alan leaned back against the headboard, running a weary hand over his face. “Iris told me that before their sedan lost control, another car had been following them for miles down the mountain road. It kept tailgating them, flashing its high beams, trying to force her father to pull over onto the narrow shoulder.”
I listened in absolute shock as Alan recounted the nightmare our daughter had kept locked inside her young mind. Iris had been sitting in her car seat in the back, holding her stuffed rabbit, watching the blinding headlights fill the rear window while her parents argued in hushed, panicked whispers in the front seat.
According to Iris, her father had been terrified, repeatedly checking his rearview mirror while her mother desperately tried to dial emergency services on a phone that had no cellular signal in the canyon. The aggressive driver behind them had bumped their rear bumper twice, sending their car skidding across the icy patch that ultimately threw them over the ravine.
