Carol never claimed to understand it.

Even now, decades later, she couldn't explain why the feeling came so suddenly or why it refused to leave. She simply knew that, on that autumn evening in 1969, something inside her kept insisting that the three young women should not get into that car.

She had been living one day at a time since leaving home. Work had come and gone. She had tried a job at a small restaurant but laughed later at how badly she had mixed up the orders. Afterward she stayed with friends, finding companionship wherever she could. Life had not been easy, but she was nineteen, and nineteen-year-olds still believe tomorrow has plenty of time to straighten itself out.

That evening was supposed to belong only to three friends.

Maggie.

Annie.

And Carol.

No dates. No boys. Just an evening together.

They borrowed one car, returned it when its owner needed it back, and switched to Maggie's brother's 1959 Oldsmobile. It was an ordinary change of plans, the sort of thing young people do without thinking twice. But Carol did think twice.

In fact, she couldn't stop thinking.

The feeling came quietly at first, almost like a passing thought. Then it returned.

Don't get in that car.

She tried to ignore it.

It came again.

This time she spoke.

"Annie," she remembered saying, "we can't get in that car. Something's going to happen." Annie smiled and tried to reassure her. She would be driving, she said. Everything would be fine.

Carol wanted to believe her.

But the feeling wouldn't leave.

They stopped at a truck stop outside Albany to use the restroom. Two servicemen struck up a conversation and invited them to spend the evening together.

The girls laughed and declined.

They had already promised that this night belonged only to them.

The servicemen followed them anyway.

By then it was late, somewhere around eleven-thirty. The roads were dark and unfamiliar. Maggie insisted on driving because it was her brother's car, even though she didn't have a driver's license. Annie sat beside her. Carol sat on the passenger side with one arm resting behind Annie's shoulders.

The headlights appeared behind them.

Carol turned just enough to see the light filling the rear window.

"Maggie, watch out," she called. "They're right on our tail."

What happened next remained frozen in her memory.

Maggie threw her hands up from the steering wheel.

The wheel spun violently.

The car, traveling close to one hundred miles an hour, left the pavement, flipped, plunged into a ditch, crashed through a barbed-wire fence, slid upside-down across the ground, and slammed into a tree so hard the front of the Oldsmobile folded back on itself.

Everything afterward came in broken pieces.

The smell.

The confusion.

People pulling them from the wreckage before the car exploded.

Carol remembered clutching her hands without understanding why they hurt so badly. When the rescuers finally pried her fingers open, they discovered strands of barbed wire buried in both palms.

The ambulance was only minutes from the hospital.

Even so, she overheard one attendant quietly tell another that she probably would not survive the ride.

At the hospital she heard doctors tell her mother they did not expect her to live through surgery.

Then everything went dark.

Carol remained in a coma for seventeen days.

When she finally awakened, she learned what her body had endured: broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a cracked shoulder blade, a crushed spleen, and so much blood loss that survival had seemed almost impossible.

Looking back, most people would naturally tell the story as a terrible automobile accident.

Carol tells a different story.

She remembers the warning.

She remembers saying they should not get into the car.

She remembers the feeling that returned again and again until she finally spoke it aloud.

She has never claimed to know where that warning came from.

She simply knows it was there.

As the years passed, that memory became one of the foundations of her faith. She came to believe that God had been watching over her long before she understood it herself. The accident was not the beginning of that conviction, but it was the moment she could never forget. Whenever people later told her that she must have guardian angels, she never argued with them. After everything she had survived, it seemed as reasonable an explanation as any.

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