Verity PDF By Colleen Hoover Book

I hear the crack of his skull before the spattering of blood reaches me.

I gasp and take a quick step back onto the sidewalk. One of my heels doesn’t

clear the curb, so I grip the pole of a No Parking sign to steady myself.

The man was in front of me a matter of seconds ago. We were standing in a

crowd of people waiting for the crosswalk light to illuminate when he stepped

into the street prematurely, resulting in a run-in with a truck. I lunged forward in

an attempt to stop him—grasping at nothing as he went down. I closed my eyes

before his head went under the tire, but I heard it pop like the cork of a

champagne bottle.

He was in the wrong, looking casually down at his phone, probably a side

effect of crossing the same street without incident many times before. Death by

routine.

People gasp, but no one screams. The passenger of the offending vehicle

jumps out of the truck and is immediately on his knees near the man’s body. I

back away from the scene as several people rush forward to help. I don’t have to

look at the man under the tire to know he didn’t survive that. I only have to look

down at my once-white shirt—at the blood now splattered across it—to know

that a hearse would serve him better than an ambulance.

I spin around to move away from the accident—to find a place to take a

breath—but the crosswalk sign now says walk and the thick crowd takes heed,

making it impossible for me to swim upstream in this Manhattan river. Some

don’t even look up from their cell phones as they pass right by the accident. I

stop trying to move, and wait for the crowd to thin. I glance back toward the

accident, careful not to look directly at the man. The driver of the truck is now at

the rear of the vehicle, wide-eyed, on a cell phone. Three, maybe four, people

are assisting them. A few are led by their morbid curiosities, filming the

gruesome scene with their phones.

If I were still living in Virginia, this would play out in a completely different

manner. Everyone around would stop. Panic would ensue, people would be

screaming, a news crew would be on scene in a matter of minutes. But here in

Manhattan, a pedestrian struck by a vehicle happens so often, it’s not much more

than an inconvenience. A delay in traffic for some, a ruined wardrobe for others.

This probably happens so often, it won’t even end up in print.

As much as the indifference in some of the people here disturbs me, it’s

exactly why I moved to this city ten years ago. People like me belong in

overpopulated cities. The state of my life is irrelevant in a place this size. There

are far more people here with stories much more pitiful than mine.

Here, I’m invisible. Unimportant. Manhattan is too crowded to give a shit

about me, and I love her for it.

“Are you hurt?”

I look up at a man as he touches my arm and scans my shirt. Deep concern is

embedded in his expression as he looks me up and down, assessing me for

injuries. I can tell by his reaction that he isn’t one of the more hardened New

Yorkers. He might live here now, but wherever he’s from, it’s a place that didn’t

completely beat the empathy out of him.

“Are you hurt?” the stranger repeats, looking me in the eye this time.

“No. It’s not my blood. I was standing near him when...” I stop speaking. I

just saw a man die. I was so close to him, his blood is on me.

I moved to this city to be invisible, but I am certainly not impenetrable. It’s

something I’ve been working on—attempting to become as hardened as the

concrete beneath my feet. It hasn’t been working out so well. I can feel

everything I just witnessed settling in my stomach.

I cover my mouth with my hand, but pull it away quickly when I feel

something sticky on my lips. More blood. I look down at my shirt. So much

blood, none of it mine. I pinch at my shirt and pull it away from my chest, but it

sticks to my skin in spots where the blood splatters are beginning to dry.

I think I need water. I’m starting to feel light-headed, and I want to rub my

forehead, pinch my nose, but I’m scared to touch myself. I look up at the man

still gripping my arm.

“Is it on my face?” I ask him.

He presses his lips together and then darts his eyes away, scanning the street

around us. He gestures toward a coffee shop a few doors down.

“They’ll have a bathroom,” he says, pressing his hand against the small of

my back as he leads me in that direction.

I look across the street at the Pantem Press building I was headed to before

the accident. I was so close. Fifteen—maybe twenty—feet away from a meeting

I desperately need to be in.

I wonder how close the man who just died was from his destination?

The stranger holds the door open for me when we reach the coffee shop.