The street is eerily silent now, save for the low murmur of distant conversations and the faint sound of the helicopter’s blades fading into the distance. The mother sits in the police car, her body rigid, eyes staring out but seeing nothing. Her hands grip each other so tightly that her knuckles turn white. The comforting words of the policewoman sitting beside her drift past her like a distant hum, but they barely register. Her mind is elsewhere—on the small red bicycle that had been her son’s favourite, on the scrape of the pedals against the pavement as he practiced in their driveway, and on the shoes he’d worn that morning when she kissed him goodbye. She doesn’t know it yet, but those shoes will sit by the front door for days, waiting for feet that will never return.
The onlookers, now fewer in number, begin to drift away as the flashing lights disappear. Some shake their heads and mumble words of pity for the boy, for his mother, and even for the driver, but they’ll forget by morning. It’s the sort of tragedy that lives only briefly in the minds of strangers. The driver, however, will never forget. He’ll relive that moment—the screech, the sickening thud, the sight of the handlebars mangled beneath his car. The policeman beside him continues to speak softly, offering words of reassurance, but they do little to stem the flood of guilt rising in the man’s chest. He grips the edge of the seat tightly, his breath coming in shallow bursts, knowing that his life, too, has changed forever in the blink of an eye.
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