Change

Change

Jevenna Willow

Author comment

I’d wanted to do something
different with this book; put a twist no one would ever expect. Then the
epiphany hit—hard. There is no such thing as something no one expects. Our
world is filled with the bizarre, the unrealistic, even the impossible…with
every turn of the head we are bombarded by what we can’t believe.

So I went with my gut on
this one. I wanted Sara’s story to come out, and now it has.

Change
is a book that will pull at your psyche in the worst
possible way, and have you step back, take a good hard look at the inner you,
then truly ask yourself, would you be her, given the chance? Given the
opportunity to change, without anyone knowing?

I believe the answer is
yes—every time. We all want things to change. Some of us are just a little more
open and honest about it than others.

I do hope you enjoy
Change
,
as much as I loved writing Sara’s story. She may not be what you expect, but
then…nothing ever is.

Jevenna

Dedication

To my darling Hubbie, who
looks at me with that cute,
“Yes, dear, I’m listening”
face, then smiles
every time I get another idea stuck in the head, another idea that needs to be
written down—and will eventually end up as another book.

You’re still my Fox.

Change

by

Jevenna Willow

copyright © 2013 Jennifer
J. Yost

published by JYCreations

This ebook version is
licensed for your personal enjoyment. Pirating author’s work is a crime.

If you would like to share
this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each
recipient. All places, names, and ideas are purely fictional, and do not
represent anyone or anything known, other than in the imagination.

I thank you for respecting
my work.

Chapter One

S
ara Rogan
was going to let the blade of life cut deep. She’d found freedom, and the only
way to enjoy it for what it’s worth, was to pay a high enough price where guilt
couldn’t take over all else.

The longer she sat in her car, guilt replaced her
anger and dread, but she knew she could afford just about anything at this point.
Eventually she would buy her guilt back, if needed. She’d altered fate.

Nevertheless, stuck in the middle of the road, the
corner of her car ripped completely off, glass and metal scattered all over the
pavement, how was she ever going to get past the enormous debt of an emotional
psyche, if the rescue squad was using a crowbar to get her out of her mangled
vehicle?

Sara closed her eyes, clenched her hands to the
steering wheel, and let life swallow her whole; allowed that blade of life to
slice through her body—deep and deadly the cuts.

“We need to get you into the ambulance Miss,” one of
the more than adorable rescue men looking in on her said. “Can you hear me?”

She stared at the man. She heard him well enough,
didn’t want anyone’s help, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to get into an
ambulance without probable cause. “I’m fine, really. The seatbelt took most of
the impact.” Sara narrowed her eyes for better focus, seeing two of him.

The rise of her rescuer’s eyebrow suggested he didn’t
believe she was fine. He seemed bored, as if a splat-victim no longer caught
his attention and had turned him into a heartless human stuck doing overtime.

He couldn’t possibly have known she’d buried her nut
job mother six feet under the cold, hard ground, and the only thing mattering
in the world was for her to disappear—today.

Of course, Sara wasn’t all that perfect
physically—felt a little out of sorts, a relentless throbbing in the forehead
and ungodly sensitive to noise. Still, she’d perfected disappearing, was on an
emotional high at this point, and a lousy car accident screwed with her easy
escape.

If anyone knew there was a huge difference between
gnawing on the thumbnail worried, and
out of the freakin` mind
terrified, Sara was that person. She couldn’t manage both right now.

~

Hours later…Sara sat on a hospital gurney with an
inability to stop fidgeting. Her left arm set in plaster cast to endure for six
long weeks, a bandage had been stuck to her forehead, and she kept darting her
eyes every five minutes to the clock.

Her cute rescuer wasn’t anywhere to be found. She
shouldn’t be surprised. He’d been a little distracted by the huge mess in the
middle of the road and the wail of sirens.

Not so fine, was the man who T-boned her car.

She could see through the crack in his door the large
amount of trained personnel, all trying to save his life. Thank God it wasn’t
her lying on that bed. Life was to be lived. A hospital bed wasn’t living.

She curled her fist in her lap, blinking rapidly to
drown out the glare of fluorescent lighting.

 “You will need to take this prescription to your
pharmacy when they open,” the emergency room nurse told her, with no emotion in
her voice whatsoever.

Apparently,
Nurse Ratchet
had seen plenty of
accidents, enough to harden her into stone, and pity was a commodity not shared
freely at Sisters of Sorrowful Hope Memorial Hospital.
Nurse Ratchet’s
nametag read Emily. Sara didn’t think such a flowery name fit such an
overbearing, needle-pushing woman.

She handed Sara the nearly legible scrap of paper made
out by an attending physician who’d been stuck on night duty, same as the
ambulance driver.

Sara glanced at the sheet. Other than a hurried look,
she gave no interest to what it spelled out. She wouldn’t fill it. The
prescription was for painkillers, and she felt perfectly capable of accepting
pain as her due. In fact, she already told anyone who could hear she would
survive a lousy car accident. Others had. Wasn’t anyone interested in that?

Sara stuffed the sheet of paper into her purse to
appease the woman. When that didn’t work, she gave the woman a wry smile,
hoping to aid her cause, because wanting to flee was the only determining
thought in her head.

 “And you will need to make an appointment with your
regular physician in the morning.” Emily then handed Sara another sheet of
paper. It spelled out what happened, and whom she should contact when able. She
had three bones,
slightly
misplaced inside the wrist, and a small crack
to the radius of her arm when the air bag hit her at eighty miles per hour.

All of her injuries were livable.

Clenching her jaw, her gaze scouted for an exit sign.
Again, another quick glance made to the prescription sheet before she folded it
in half and stuffed it inside the remainder of life.

Thank God, the authorities hadn’t confiscated her
purse at the scene of the accident. Paranoia was one condition to survive.
Distrust wasn’t as easy compensated over.

Practically glued to her hip was a cheap leather purse
containing one hundred thousand dollars. She’d cashed in her lottery ticket ten
minutes after she dumped her mother’s body into a burial plot—just pulled out
from the lottery department parking lot, when WHAM! SPLAT!

Roadside savior, doctor, lottery department
treasurer…they were all the same. Men. No matter how cute or helpful, they
weren’t to be trusted.

Sara had good reason not to trust men. She’d developed
a pattern of allowing no other to get close to her heart, or close to her. So
far, this worked to her favor.

The winning lottery ticket had been the only good
thing in her life. She’d spent five lousy bucks to buy it, the last five bucks
to her name, and it paid off on the day her mother died…in a very big way.

Lady Luck never smiled on Sara before, but she
certainly kept to the task of grinning her ass off for three full days. If only
Lady Luck had kept up smiling, Sara wouldn’t be in this new mess now.

“Can I go?” she questioned the woman, a heightened,
urgent need to distance herself from this place.

She turned a tentative eye to the room at the far side
of the emergency bay, expecting Lady Luck was no longer following her. All of a
sudden, the door closed, and she could no longer see the man lying inside the
room. The last glimpse of her
hundred-mile-an-hour hell on wheels
…
he
now lay still as a statue.

Sara didn’t feel sorry for him. She couldn’t. It
wasn’t in her to
feel
right now. Yet, with perfectionist tendencies, she
found herself asking, “Is he dead?”, and hoped the answer to be what she most
wanted to hear. Explanations were always needed for dead men, and she had
places to go and things to do. She didn’t want an unnecessary delay, keeping
her from life.

She did want the man to stay alive—spite alone fueled
this thought. He deserved a little agony and a long recovery. The jerk ruined
her perfect day. What more could she have ever asked for than the disposal of
the one woman who’d made her life miserable, on the very hour of becoming a
rich woman?

Nurse Emily glanced toward the closed emergency room
door, returning a cold unfeeling gaze to Sara. “No. He’s pretty ripped up, and
likely to stay in the hospital for a bit.”

No shit, he’s ripped up! He hit me at a hundred miles
plus. He should be more than a little out of whack; just like my car,
a
nd my…

Sara highly doubted the ER nurse was telling her the
truth about the man’s condition. There’d been a lot of blood at the scene—face,
legs, arms—and she’d heard from one of the paramedic who supposedly
rescued
her, there’d been a lot of blood
in
him, pooling around his vital organs
and not staying in the veins and arteries.

The police told her the accident victim’s accelerator
had stuck in a brand new car with less than one thousand miles on it, but she
didn’t believe this. The man, though covered in blood at the scene, looked too
much in control of life to have something as simple as an accelerator stuck
while careening past others well beyond the speed limit.

She heard it could happen, things sticking. However,
she did not believe it—not this time. One look at her cast, and the memory of a
nearly cut in half hunk of metal proved, without a doubt, he’d been in full
control of destiny.

Sara Rogan would now live life the only way it could
be lived. The accident wasn’t her fault. She’d been well within her lane, one
hand on the wheel, the other on a cheeseburger, her vehicles’ turn signal on,
blinking rapidly due to a short in the fuse, while trying to make a relatively
normal lane change, and not trying to draw too much attention to herself than
was absolutely necessary.

She got slammed by a man fucking with destiny.

Then Sara found fate to be far crueler milliseconds
after the accident.

Would she be contacting her lawyer, making a lawsuit?
Hell, no! What good would her suing anyone do? She didn’t need the money. She
had her own. One hundred thousand big ones stuffed inside her purse, and if she
was frugal the money should last her until she found a better life.

What she needed was to get the hell out of this
hospital before anyone discovered she gave the police and the hospital a false
name, and used a faked driver’s license—with no insurance to pay the hospital
bill. The laptop, her clothing crammed into a suitcase, the half-eaten
cheeseburger…they could stay exactly where they were, rotting inside the crumpled
pile of metal hauled to the junk yard.

Once she could walk out the revolving door on the
other side of the emergency room, she was going to disappear. Again.

The man in the other room flat-lined quite suddenly.
Christ! He had perfect timing to a perfectly wretched day, didn’t he?

While heads turned, and medical personnel rushed
about, she took a deep breath of antiseptic overindulgence, slipped off the
gurney, grabbing her purse by the only good hand left her, and walked out the
door, cringing in pain. A dying man was a real attention grabber. Even the
security guard at the hospital exit had turned his sight away—briefly, it was
enough for an easy escape.

Once outside, Sara climbed into the closest taxi that
would drive her the furthest distance away in the shortest amount of time. She
gave the man a faked address. She would walk the three blocks back to the bus
station once he dropped her off.

Sara
Nobody
turned into Sara
Somebody
and was a wanted woman less than two hours later. She hadn’t done anything wrong
to be wanted. The police simply felt, in most cases, normal women wouldn’t walk
out of a hospital a few hours after a rather horrific accident, with one of
those involved in the accident flat-lined and the other with barely a scratch.
Normal women would have called someone—made a fuss.

Sara wasn’t normal. Her nut job mother had made
certain of this.

However, the police had questions, and Sara supposedly
had answers to give.

She didn’t want to answer any more questions. She had
money to spend. She couldn’t put much thought to what her disappearance would
look like to others. She wanted only to be gone.

Her plan was to disappear from the memories, most
especially, from the past. No one wanted to see a man die, or go through any
unnecessary medical tests of her own, or have medical personnel fawn all over a
few lousy breaks of a few lousy bones. She wasn’t going to sue anyone. She
didn’t give a damn about her car. It had been a piece of shit to begin with.
Bipolar
Nut Job
was dead. Life was good.

What mildly surprised her was all those tests hadn’t
been questioned as to the healed over fractures of childhood, the broken bones
of adolescent youth, and the haunting past of a very miserable life.

She paid her cigar smoking taxi driver a hefty tip for
his service, gave him an easy smile through the window…then vanished.

Sara’s mother perfected disappearing acts while alive.
Months on end, the woman would become invisible, leaving her young daughter
home alone, and on more than one occasion Sara unable to fend for herself. She
knew how to disappear…and when to do it. From this moment forward, things had
to change.

They sure as hell couldn’t stay the same.