The name associated with this address was a certain Amanda.
The woman who answered was undoubtedly the woman from the video. She looked at my face and froze.
“Amanda?” I asked.
She nodded once.
“So now you know why I’m here.”
The woman who answered me was undoubtedly the woman from the video.
She led me into a small sitting room. We sat facing each other, and neither of us spoke for almost a full minute. I looked at her hands. She looked at mine.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I was going to be Thomas’s wife,” she revealed. “We were engaged. Six weeks before the wedding, it happened… the accident.”
I wasn’t expecting that. “He never mentioned it.”
“I was going to become Thomas’s wife.”
And she began to speak. It lasted about twenty minutes.
That day, Dad was driving his best friend’s car… my father’s car. My father was in the passenger seat. My mother was in the back. The three of them were on their way to meet Amanda at the place they had booked for the wedding reception.
A sharp turn on a secondary road outside the city caused the car to lose traction and veer off the road.
Thomas was thrown into the void at the moment of impact. My parents, however, were not.
This lasted about twenty minutes.
“He called me from the hospital,” Amanda added. She lowered her eyes. “He kept saying it was his fault. That he took the turn too fast. That he should have been more careful.”
“Was it Dad’s fault?”
“The investigation found evidence of brake failure,” Amanda recalls. “Thomas wasn’t speeding. He hadn’t been drinking. The mechanic said there probably wouldn’t have been anything he could have done.”
“The brakes had been damaged.”
“But he never accepted it.”
“He kept saying, ‘If I hadn’t insisted on taking that road. If I had waited. If I had driven slower.’”
Then she told me about the social worker who had called the hospital while Thomas was still in remission.
No relatives had come forward.
Thomas had refused to let me go.
No relatives had come forward.
He told Amanda they would adopt me. That he owed that much to his best friend.
Amanda’s voice dropped when she reached that part. “I told him I wasn’t cut out for this, to raise a child who had just suffered so much loss and pain. I wasn’t strong enough.”
Thomas had listened to everything she said.
And then he ended the engagement and chose me.
