On January 19, 2018, shortly before 10 AM, Robin Lafleur exited Texas Highway 290 at First Street, as she did every morning on her way to work at Austin Habitat for Humanity. It was a cold, cloudy morning, but Lafleur was in a good mood. She finally felt settled in her new home, which she’d bought less than a year before in Cedar Park, a suburb northwest of Austin. It was a Friday, and she had happy-hour plans with friends after work, so she was wearing one of her favorite outfits—maroon jeggings and a new mauve sweater with matching boots.
She doesn’t remember much about what happened next. As Lafleur merged onto the frontage road, a car stopped abruptly in front of her. She slammed into it. When she woke up, she was in a hospital gown at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center; the nurses had cut her clothes off her body to take a CT scan. The concussion she’d suffered kept her out of work for more than three months. “I was told that to heal, I needed to sit in a quiet room and let the time go by,” she says. “It was horrific, because the days went by so slowly.”
