Page 6 of Better than Famous

The water reached my thighs, cold and thick with the scent of rotting leaves. I was breathing more in gasps than breaths as panic sunk its claws into me. The water was near my knees now. “No. Just my leg. But the car is shifting. Get me out. Now. Please!”

The paramedic checked the angle of the car, then studied the rising water. He pulled a small, serrated tool from a pocket on his chest, and the blade glinted in the blue strobe of the lights.

I let out a yelp.

In the darkness, he froze. “You’re safe, okay? I’m getting you out of the car.”

He reached across me, and the seatbelt gave way with a sharp snap. The pressure on my ribs vanished.

One arm slid behind my back, the other under my knees, and Ben gently scooped me up. He lifted me from the wreckage as if I weighed nothing. I wrapped my arms around his neck, burying my face in the rough, wet canvas of his coat as I ignored my sore chest. He smelled like rain, diesel, and something clean like soap.

"Hold on," he murmured.

He turned and climbed the embankment. The power in his stride moved us both up the mud-slicked slope. He didn’t stumble. He didn’t falter. Even my leg steadied to a dull throb. For the first time since I’d left Miami, maybe for the first time since I’d signed my first contract at nineteen, I was entirely, completely shielded.

"Clear the way!" he shouted to someone at the top. "Patient is coming up. Keep the lights out of her eyes."

Ben carried me straight to the back of the ambulance, bypassing the small crowd of firefighters and police gathering at the guardrail. He didn’t put me down until we were inside the bright, sterile box, and the doors were firmly shut against the night.

Two hours later, the Lower Keys Medical Center was a study in fluorescent misery. There were no VIP suites here, no private doctors who signed NDAs before they took your temperature. I sat on a gurney in a bay of the ER, clutching a thin, scratchy blanket around my shoulders. I was shivering, though I wasn’t sure if it was from the cold or the shock. My wig was still on, though it listed dangerously to the left. I straightened it in a futile effort at control. My gray sweatpants were stained with swamp mud. My ankle was propped up on a pillow and wrapped in an ACE bandage that felt too tight.

The doctor—a man with a frantic energy and a name I’d already forgotten—had spent five minutes poking at my ribs and twisting my foot. After inspecting my imaging and various lab results, he’d pronounced me lucky. Bruised ribs, a Grade One ankle sprain, and minor abrasions. No internal bleeding. No broken bones. Just the kind of injuries that throbbed with every heartbeat.

"Still feeling shaky, Kate?"

I glanced up. Brenda, the nurse who had cleaned the swamp muck from my arms, stood at the foot of my bed. She offered a small, sympathetic smile as she checked the readout on my monitor. Kate Green was my usual alias, and I had given it as my name without even thinking about it.

"A little." My voice was a dry rasp.

"I bet. That was a nasty spill." Brenda leaned against the railing of the gurney. "Listen, honey, the registrar is going to be by in a minute, and they’re sticklers for paperwork. Is there someone you can call? If you remember a number, you can use my personal cell. I know yours is at the bottom of the channel."

She pulled a phone from her scrub pocket and held it out, an open invitation to reach for help.

I stared at the black screen. My flash of hope at her offer turned to a cold realization settling in my stomach. My contacts were in my phone. My phone was in the mud. I hadn’t dialed a number in years and the ones I remembered were from my distant past. Nash’s number was a speed-dial icon. Mindy’s was a voice command. Even my mother’s number was just a thumbnail of her face on a screen.

"I... I don’t know," I whispered.

Brenda tilted her head, her expression softening into pity. "Not even one? A best friend? An office?"

"Everything is programmed," I said. The humiliation burned hotter than the scrapes on my arm. "I haven’t had to type in a phone number since I was nineteen. I don’t know anyone’s digits."

"Oh, honey. Don’t feel bad." Brenda patted my hand, her touch warm and grounding. "That’s just the world we live in now. I’d be lost without my contact list, too." She sighed, looking down at my blank intake form. "I’ll try to stall the registrar for a bit, but we’re eventually going to need something more than your name if we’re going to get you a ride out of here."

She moved on to a crying toddler three gurneys down. I was alone again in the fluorescent glare, and my heart sank nearly as much as when the paramedic had left me with the ER staff after giving them report. He’d given me a tired smile that looked like the most genuine thing I’d ever glimpsed and disappeared. He was the one thing I’d been able to count on since my car ran off the road, then he was gone. I was truly on my own.

The tremors started in my hands and worked their way up my arms. Instinctively, I reached for my throat. My fingers searched for the familiar weight of the gold oval, the smooth metal that usually sat right in the hollow of my neck.

Nothing.

My hand clawed at the bare skin of my collarbone. I checked the front of my mud-stained shirt, then the scratchy hospital sheets. My fingers tangled in the matted fibers of the wig, but they didn’t find a chain.

My locket was gone. It must have stayed in the car or slipped off when the giant pulled me through the window.

A fresh wave of desolation washed over me. That locket was the only thing I owned that hadn’t been vetted by a branding committee or purchased by a production company. My grandmother had pressed it into my palm the day I left Tennessee at nineteen, a reminder of the girl who sang in church pews before the world turned me into a siren. It held a tiny, grainy photo of us from the summer I turned six.

It was my anchor. Without it, I was just a ghost in a hallway with a name that didn’t belong to me and a hollow space where my history used to be.

I closed my eyes.