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The nurse gives me a soft, sad smile. I hate how it's supposed to be placating me, but all it does is make me feel crazier than I ever have in my entire life.
"Don't look at me like that!" I snap.
"Dear, I'm just trying to help, alright? We need you to calm down, for your own good."
She's not understanding anything. Being calm won't change anything, so why does it matter if I'm calm or not? My baby is gone. “My own good” would be for my son to have never been murdered inside me!
My pulse spikes once more. Intense. My chest hurts. I can barely breathe. And in all of this, the nurse remains as calm as ever, moving over to the IV drip with a needle to insert into a port. Whatever she injects, it works fast.
"What are you…"
I'm hit with a brick of exhaustion. My eyes roll and I fall back onto the hospital bed with a dull thud. Everything goes black around me. Muddled sounds, like I'm caught somewhere deep below quiet waters.
That’s fine, though. I just want my baby back.
So if I can’t have that, I want darkness.
63
REESE
I've been sitting in this hospital waiting room for two days. No one bothers me. If anything, I'm sure they just expect me to rot here.
I'm a piece of shit.
All of Olivia's encouraging words couldn't stop the critical blow to reality that was seeing her break down in front of me. There's no one to blame but myself for that one.
My head swims. I have questions that will likely never be answered. None of this makes sense. It's too wild to feel true, but fuck, I'm living it, aren't I? I'm smack in the fucking middle of mess that I created.
It'd be one thing if it was just me caught in the crossfire. But now, it's everyone around me. Olivia, our child, Violet. Dante and Marcus. Quinn and Olivia's mother. This shit could have gone south in so many ways. And yet there I was, Reese Dalton, too proud to think that maybe, I'd sink us so deep we'd end up in a hole we couldn't get out of.
This is what the bottom of the hole feels like.
I can't help but wonder if there's some truth in the lies Holly told me to write in that godforsaken fucking note. Maybe Olivia would be better without me in her life. She could move on, find a man who won't have his past mistakes come back to haunt them both. Someone without so many sins in his rearview mirror. Someone who isn’t so fucking stupid.
I've never felt like this and my fucking God, I'd kill to never have to feel this again.
And that's the other thing, isn't it? In all this, I took a life and in the end, it didn't even matter. Sure, Elliot's working his ass off keeping mine out of the slammer. But that's not the thing. It's that there's no fucking closure in Holly being dead. No vindication.
I couldn't save my own child from death, and I couldn't keep Olivia from this unending pain.
What kind of man does that make me?
I push my hands through my hair and hunch over. There are dozens of messages from Dante and Marcus on my phone. I told them to lie low for now, but they're antsy, desperate to check in on Olivia. She's a sister to them. They're torn up about this shit, too. And somehow, just like Olivia, they haven't taken the opportunity to tell me what a scumbag I am, how this is all my fault.
I just need someone to tell me I'm right. I know what I am. No way around it.
"Well, aren't you a sorry fuckin' sight."
I look up. It's Coach Driscoll.
He's got his hands in his pockets. He hasn't slept much more than I have, by the looks of it. Man looks like the Grim Reaper.
"Coach—”
He holds up his hand. "Don't get up. You look like shit."
He takes the seat beside me. I feel like I'm about to get a lecture, so I start to say, "Listen if you're gonna bitch me out?—"
