The taste of copper in my mouth was the first thing I noticed when the world stopped spinning. It was a thick, metallic tang that competed with the acrid stench of deployed airbags and the hiss of steam escaping from what was once the hood of my Honda. My name is Rebecca Martinez, and three weeks ago, my life was measured in the rhythmic, agonizing thrum of a fractured collarbone and the sharp, stabbing reminders of three broken ribs.
The paramedics were efficient, their voices a blur of clinical urgency as the Jaws of Life groaned against the twisted wreckage of my car. A delivery truck had decided that a red light was merely a suggestion, t-boning me at sixty miles per hour. As they strapped me onto the gurney, my consciousness flickered like a dying candle, but one thought remained incandescent: Emma.
My six-week-old daughter was at home with my seventy-two-year-old neighbor, Mrs. Chin, who had only agreed to a twenty-minute window while I ran to the grocery store. Now, I was being whisked away to County General, and the twenty minutes were rapidly dissolving into hours.
With trembling fingers and a vision obscured by a scarlet veil of blood from a head gash, I reached for my phone in the ambulance. I didn’t call my husband, Marcus, yet; he was on a plane from Dallas and wouldn’t land for hours. I called my mother, Patricia.
