In ten minutes the world cracked wide open. Chanden had burst into the camper with the police and they grabbed Duane and Ellie, his victim, hadn't stopped to think. She jumped, and she ran.

Now, beneath the hollowed-out husk of a Ford Expedition, the junkyard rose like a metal fortress around her crumpled body. The blood on her fingers was dried black. Her step-brother tried to shoot her in the stomach but he missed, he missed...

Indigo hadn't kicked in hours.

Ellie bit her lip until salt filled her mouth. The truth was that she had known what Duane was going to do. How could she not? For weeks she had been lying to herself – his rage is not my fault, it is not my fault. Which was the truth. But not the complete truth.

It was true, she had slept with Frederick. It was also true that Duane had been planning to come after her for months, and that she had known about it, and wanted to take preventative measures. The pregnancy had been unfortunate. Not all together unwarranted.

The not-complete truth was the one Alice and Rowan had told her. They hadn't known about Frederick, or Duane assaulting her. They had known she had lied. It was her own mistake, to claim the baby as Duane's, to make him scapegoat.

She hadn't thought, really thought, he would try to kill her. Until he tried to fire a bullet in her stomach and she watched her dreams of Indigo, her beautiful turquoise-eyed, fair-haired baby disappear.

Footsteps. Chanden appeared on the other side of the junkyard. He strode towards her, firm and definite, and she didn't meet his eyes.

"Come to condemn me?"

He crouched down. Took her palm in his own and a rag from his pocket. Careful, he wiped the blood from one hand, then the other. He ran it over her cheek and across her forehead, and dabbed water on the upraised fingerprints circling her neck.

"Out of thousands of campers, why mine?"

"The pink shoe." From his back pocket he produced both. The left shoe, broken in her fall, had been taped back together. Chanden glanced at her bare feet, cracked and torn from running through metal, and said: "Are you in a shoe kind of mood?"

"I suppose so." her smile cut and broke on her mouth.

"Great." he knelt down, steadying himself with one hand on her wrist, and helped her slip into the flip-flops.

"You could be Charming now," she said.

"Nah." his cheeks ran red. Chanden flattened the whitened cowlick at his forehead. "I'd need an un-totaled Benz for that."

"You drive a Benz."

"I did." he paused, grinning. "Why? Impressed?"

"Not even a little bit," Ellie said, and reached out to take his hand. "Coffee would be perfect right now."

Chanden ran his thumb over her knuckles. "Onward!"

#

After Alice and Rowan had said their apologies and denied their involvement and left for Texas; after Duane had been arrested and jailed; after the neighboring campers, alarmed at the gunshot, had been calmed and appeased; after the police had gone to solve the case of the reckless BMX riders; after Chanden's father had patted him on the back and returned his car keys; after Ellie had stopped trying to drink coffee and cry at the same time, and Chanden had stopped trying to let her, the festival grounds fell back into a comfortable solitude.

Night hovered in the distance. The clouds, flung apart in the storm, faded to lavender. Ellie, sitting cross-legged on the roof of the camper, tugged tube socks onto her cold feet.

Chanden flicked her ankle gently. "You look like an eighties basketball player."

"They're emergency socks," she said. "Today qualifies."

"Hmm." he gathered up a handful of her hair, ran it through his fingers. "How's Indigo?"

"Better. She's kicking again. See?" she took his hand and pressed his fingers against his stomach.

Amazed, he looked up at her. "Beautiful," he said.

Ellie was quiet. Then she touched his forehead, his eyebrow, the curve of his neck where it connected to his shoulder. "Thanks for meeting me."

"Translation: thanks for being a champ, and saving my life."

Smiling, she pushed his shoulder, then tucked her feet underneath her. "You can hardly take credit for the work of three security guards."

"True. All though I found the camper."

"The shoes," she said. "And to think, when I bought them, I hated them."

Chanden dipped his head toward her. "They suit you," he mumbled.

She started laughing, and he started laughing, and they were both laughing in the cool almost-twilight under a sky that had just born tragedy, and she asked him if he had been going to kiss her, and he told her maybe, if she was all right with that.

I am, she said, as the breeze turned her blue eyes grey, Indigo curling under her ribcage, her phone for the first time silent.

So he did.

THE END