Highway Rebirth:This Time I Won’t Save You

A road trip over the holiday weekend. My boyfriend missed the highway exit because he was too busy chatting with his childhood friend, Kathryn Fox.

To save time, Kathryn suggested driving the wrong way back to the exit.

I objected on the spot and pulled up gruesome crash videos to scare my boyfriend out of it.

In the end, under my insistence, he agreed to take the detour off the highway.

Because the detour cost us time, Kathryn missed the influencer meet-and-greet at the prairie music festival.

Furious about missing the signing, Kathryn stormed off on her own—and wandered straight into a wolf pack. They tore her apart. There was almost nothing left.

My boyfriend cradled what remained of her bones and passed out from sobbing. When he came to, he calmly buried her, then turned around and proposed to me.

Just as I was dreaming of our beautiful future together, he drugged me on our wedding night, tied me up, and drove hundreds of miles through the darkness to the exact spot where Kathryn had died.

When he saw the wolves, he kicked me out of the car. His teeth were clenched so hard the words came out shaking: "You and your brilliant idea got Kathryn killed. Now you can crawl into a wolf's belly and keep her company!"

I was eaten alive.

Then I opened my eyes—and I was back. Back to the day Kathryn talked my boyfriend into driving the wrong way on the highway.

——

"Take a detour off the highway? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea how many extra miles that is?"

"By the time we get there, the signing will be over! Then what was the point of driving all this way?"

The moment my eyes opened, I was staring at Kathryn Fox twisting around from the passenger seat, her face contorted with rage as she screamed at me.

I glanced out the window at the highway and everything clicked into place.

I'd been reborn.

Reborn to the exact day Ivor Dickerson had missed the exit and pulled over on the shoulder to figure out what to do.

"If we just drive back the wrong way, it's less than twenty miles. Go fast enough and we'll be there in fifteen minutes! Fifteen minutes—what could possibly happen?"

"Ivor, listen to me. Just turn around and gun it. If anything goes wrong, that's on me!"

When I didn't argue back, Kathryn turned to Ivor and kept pushing him to reverse down the highway to the exit.

Ivor did whatever Kathryn told him—he always had. But driving the wrong way on a highway wasn't exactly a small thing. He turned around and looked at the three of us in the back seat, his eyes asking the question his mouth wouldn't.

Five of us in the car. That's how many there were.

Originally, it was supposed to be just me and Ivor—a couple's adventure trip through the Gobi Desert. Halfway there, his childhood sweetheart Kathryn called saying she wanted to go to some prairie music festival. Ivor ignored my objections, drove over a hundred miles out of the way to pick up Kathryn and her two friends, and rerouted to the festival.

I'd been driving at first, with Ivor in the passenger seat. Then he offered to "take over for a while," put himself behind the wheel, and moved Kathryn up front. For convenience, he said. So they could catch up.

That left me in the back seat with Kathryn's two friends.

Those two were cut from the same cloth as Kathryn. Naturally, they were all for her plan to barrel down the highway in the wrong direction.

In my previous life, I was the only one who'd fought it. I'd pulled up video after video of horrific wrong-way crashes until I finally scared some sense into them.

I'd used my common sense and my stubbornness to save these idiots from themselves. And my reward was being fed to wolves.

Not this time. This time, I wasn't going to stop a single one of these fools from getting themselves killed. All I needed to do was get as far away from them as possible.

I smiled faintly. "You know what, I was being hasty before. I didn't consider the time issue."

"Since you all think driving back to the exit is fine, I won't argue."

"But my stomach's acting up. I need to step out for a minute."

I stood and reached for the door handle.

"No!"

Before I could even straighten up, Kathryn whipped around and shoved me back down.