The Crash

Polly knows that if Tegan doesn’t get medicine for her infection soon, she’ll die. Her baby might die too. Polly blames Tegan, who didn’t let her take her boot off sooner. Despite the urgency of Tegan’s condition, Polly tells Hank that she is fine. Before Hank leaves for work, he tells Polly that he loves her. It surprises her and even makes her uneasy since he’s been furious with her.

Polly orders antibiotics from the pharmacy by impersonating a doctor she used to work with. She also orders a low-dose blood thinner, as she’s worried that Tegan may have developed a blood clot in her leg from lying down for so long. Then, she cleans and bandages the wound on Tegan’s foot. Tegan sleeps through it, barely stirring. With a stethoscope, Polly can hear the baby’s heartbeat, but it’s faint.

Tegan wakes again later that morning to the sound of Hank coming down the basement stairs. He picks her up and says that he needs to take her to the hospital before Polly gets back. Tegan assumes that he’s lying, but she’s too weak to protest. In the driveway, Tegan sees Simon standing next to Hank’s truck. When he disappears, she realizes that she’s hallucinating.

On the road, Tegan tries to signal other drivers for help, still unable to believe Hank’s claim that he’s taking her to the hospital. She’s about to try to jump out of the moving car when she sees the hospital in front of her. Hank tells Tegan that Polly is a good person and that he’s going to get her help. The last thing Tegan remembers is entering the emergency room on a stretcher.

Polly comes home from the pharmacy to find Tegan gone. When Hank returns and reveals what he did, Polly feels hatred for him. She accuses him of betraying her and ruining their lives. She locks herself in their bedroom, but when Hank threatens to call 911, she lets him in. She placates him, convincing him that she’s okay, but decides to enact a secret plan when he eventually leaves the house.

In the hospital, after getting antibiotics, fluids, and a small dose of morphine, Tegan feels better, and the baby is stable. She learns that the police found evidence that her car was tampered with before her accident. She decides that when the police return, she’ll tell them everything Polly and Hank did to her.

Dennis visits her, but she’s too exhausted and traumatized to explain what happened. She gets angry when she learns that Jackson Bruckner is in the waiting room, wanting to see her. However, thoughts about future hospital bills and life expenses make her wish that she’d kept quiet about being raped and accepted Simon’s money.

Polly realizes that Hank removed all the medicines they had at home, as well as her razors and scissors. He forgot to take the kitchen knives, though. When Hank goes out to chop firewood, Polly puts on her old scrubs, planning to sneak into the hospital during the shift change when the nurses are distracted. She takes a pair of scissors from the kitchen knife block with her.

While Dennis is in the cafeteria, Jackson comes into Tegan’s hospital room, even though she said she didn’t want to see him and told the nurse not to let anyone except Dennis in. Jackson tells Tegan that he reacted horribly when she said that Simon raped her, and he’s ashamed. Tegan gets the frightening sense that something isn’t quite right. Jackson leans close to her and says that there’s something she needs to know.

Polly enters the hospital unnoticed and heads toward the labor and delivery ward. She plans to kill Tegan with the scissors in her pocket so that Tegan can never tell anyone what she and Hank did. She thinks about Hank having a fresh start without her since she’ll likely be in prison or dead after this.

Dennis returns to Tegan’s hospital room before Jackson can reveal what he wanted to tell her. He catches Tegan’s hints that she doesn’t want Jackson there and makes him leave. Tegan and Dennis talk about the similarity of her crash to the car accident that broke Dennis’s leg and ruined his professional skiing career. His accident also occurred on icy roads after a snowstorm.

Dennis urges Tegan to reconsider accepting Simon’s money in light of the hospital expenses she’s incurring. She still hasn’t told him that Simon raped her. Too tired to continue the conversation, Tegan falls asleep.

When she reaches Tegan’s room, Polly finds Dennis trying to connect a syringe to Tegan’s IV while she sleeps. He’s clearly trying to harm Tegan, which would take care of Polly’s problem for her. Instead of letting him do it, however, she intervenes. Dennis bolts, and Polly chases him.

Tegan wakes up and recognizes Polly as she’s exiting the room. Dennis is faster than Polly, but Jackson, who’s waiting for an elevator, stops him. Polly tells Jackson and a security guard what Dennis was doing and then hurries to leave before anyone recognizes her.

Detective Maxwell, who’s been investigating Simon Lamar, informs Tegan that Simon and Dennis paid someone to cut her brake lines; then, Dennis convinced her to visit him. Dennis and Simon had a business deal to open new ski resorts, and Simon told Dennis that he’d back out of the deal if Tegan went to the police about him. The call that Jackson made to Tegan just before her crash was to tell her that he was going to the police about Simon, who he realized had done the same thing to other women.

According to Detective Maxwell, Simon is now in custody, and they have enough evidence to keep him from hurting anyone again. Tegan also learns that the syringe that Dennis left behind contained a lethal dose of morphine. She realizes that Polly saved her life.

When Polly exits the hospital, Hank is in the parking lot looking for her. She assures him that all the police cars near the hospital’s entrance aren’t there for her. As Hank drives them home, Polly tells him that she plans to make an appointment with Dr. Salinsky. Hank says that he loves her more than anything, and Polly realizes that he’s all the family she needs. When they near their driveway, they see police lights flashing.

Polly realizes that the police are at Mitch Hambly’s house, not theirs. An officer informs Polly and Hank that Mitch is dead: He was reportedly drunk and fell down the front steps. He landed with his face in the snow and was knocked unconscious, leading him to suffocate.

Tegan has her baby and names her Tia Marie Werner. She told the police that she hit her head during the car crash and can’t remember anything that happened in the following days. She’s often tempted to tell them what really happened but always changes her mind. Jackson, who has a lot of compromising information about Simon, convinces him to sign a contract guaranteeing child support payments to Tegan.

Jackson visits Tegan in the hospital daily and arranges physical therapy, nannies, and housekeepers for when Tegan goes home. As he sets the pink teddy bear that he brought for Tia on the dresser, he notices another teddy bear. It’s the one from Polly’s pantry. The note attached says, “Dear Tegan, I wish you and your daughter all the happiness in the world. Love, Polly” (315).

One year later, Tegan and Tia live in their own house, which Jackson helped her fix up. With time and effort, Tegan regained the ability to walk on her own. She’s in therapy to deal with her trauma and has learned to stop blaming Hank and Polly. Dennis and Simon are both serving long prison sentences. Tegan still sees nursing school in her future and has high hopes for Jackson to have a romantic role in her life and a fatherly one in Tia’s.

After Mitch’s death, Sadie goes into foster care. Soon, however, Polly’s doctor testifies to her stability, and she and Hank become foster parents for Sadie, with plans to adopt her. Hank makes a wonderful father, and Polly is grateful that he kept her from ruining her life a year ago.

Hank reveals that before looking for Polly at the hospital a year ago, he looked for her at Sadie’s house. Mitch was drunk and belligerent, and Sadie showed clear signs of physical abuse, so Hank killed Mitch by holding his face in the snow. He expected that Sadie would tell the police what happened, and he was willing to face the consequences, but she never did. When he worries that she might hate him for killing her father, Sadie avows happily that Hank is her father.