Chapter 2 - The Brother Who Stood in the Gap
Toby's hands were trembling as violently as mine when his fingers brushed against my cold knuckles.
"Get your butt back inside that vehicle right this second, Toby!" Eleanor shrieked, leaning half her torso out the window.
"She’s carrying your niece, Mom!" Toby roared back, his voice cracking with an adolescent fury that stunned the empty woods.
Nathan took two aggressive strides toward us, his hands balling into fists inside his designer jacket.
"Give that back to me, Toby, or I swear to God you are walking the rest of the way to the state line."
"Touch me and I’ll break your nose, Nathan," Toby muttered, standing upright and placing his tall, lanky frame directly between me and his older brother.
I didn't waste a single heartbeat.
My thumb unlocked the screen with trembling precision, bypassing my missed calls to dial an eight-digit direct line.
It wasn't 911, and it wasn't my frail sister who lived three hours away in Columbus.
It was Marcus Vance, the chief logistics director of Vance Hauling & Logistics, and my former employer before Nathan forced me to resign.
Marcus Vance was also my uncle on my late mother’s side, a man Eleanor had spent five years calling "a vulgar grease monkey."
The phone rang twice before the deep, gravelly voice broke through the speakerphone.
"Clara? You were supposed to be at the obstetric clinic in Oakridge an hour ago."
"Marcus," I managed to say, but my breath hitched as another sharp cramp rippled through my lower abdomen.
"Clara, what happened to you? Where are you right now?" Marcus demanded, the sound of diesel engines immediately cutting off in his background.
"Old Ridge Road, half a mile south of the abandoned mill," I whispered, holding the phone close to my shivering mouth.
"Nathan ran out of gas. My knee is dislocated. There is blood, Marcus. I need a flatbed and an ambulance right now."
Nathan stepped forward, trying to grab the phone over Toby’s shoulder.
"Clara, hang that up! You are humiliating this entire family over a blown tire and a sprain!"
"Nathan Miller, is that your miserable voice I hear?" Marcus’s roar boomed so loudly through the speaker that Nathan stopped dead in his tracks.
"Marcus, don't interfere in our private marital disputes," Nathan said, trying to steady his tone into his usual boardroom composure.
"You touch her again, Nathan, and God help you before the state police arrive," Marcus growled before hanging up.
The sudden silence on the lonely road was suffocating.
Eleanor stepped out of the passenger seat, wrapping her expensive camel-hair coat tightly around her shoulders.
"Look at the spectacle you have created," Eleanor spat, looking down at me as if I were vermin crawled out from a sewer pipe.
"When Nathan’s father was alive, a good woman knew how to handle her husband's indiscretions with grace and decorum."
"You were never worthy of the Miller name, coming from a family of mechanics and truck drivers."
"Your father died penniless in a nursing home, Eleanor," I fired back, my teeth chattering from shock and the creeping hypothermia.
"And your precious golden boy doesn't even own this car; my father's life insurance paid the down payment on it."
Nathan’s eyes narrowed into slits. "You gave that money to the household, Clara. That makes it marital property."
"You gave it to your girlfriend's jeweler, you coward," Toby said, glaring at his brother with undisguised contempt.
"Shut your mouth, Toby, you don't understand how real men survive in this world," Nathan snarled.
Down in the valley, the unmistakable wail of a dual-tone siren began echoing off the limestone cliffs.
It wasn't approaching from the south where the suburban sheriff patrolled.
It was screaming up the northern ridge from the heavy industrial district where Marcus operated his fleet.
Along with the siren came the deep, thundering roar of an eighteen-ton twin-axle Kenworth recovery wrecker.
Eleanor looked down the winding asphalt path, her porcelain makeup cracking under a sudden mask of panic.
"Get back in the car, Nathan! We need to push it onto the shoulder before someone takes pictures!"
"The car isn't moving an inch, Eleanor," I said, leaning my back against the ditch embankment and holding my belly.
Toby pulled off his heavy flannel overshirt and gently wrapped it around my bare, freezing ankles.
"I’m sorry, Clara," the teenager whispered, kneeling beside me with tears cutting through the grease on his cheeks.
"I thought Nathan was just teasing you earlier when he joked about making you walk the hill."
"I didn't know about Vanessa until yesterday when I found her earrings in the glove box."
"It’s not your fault, Toby," I murmured, my hand resting gently on his shoulder. "You gave me the phone."
The headlights of the Kenworth broke through the dense fog, blinding Nathan and Eleanor as they stood stranded beside their stalled luxury.
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Behind the wrecker came a county paramedic unit, red and white strobes painting the wet cedar trees in vivid crimson.
The Miller family's polite, suburban illusion was about to be obliterated under forty tons of roaring industrial reality.
