“She’s tachycardic, looks like VT, we need to defibrillate…”
It’s too late, I think to myself. I’m not on a plane. Did I even get on one? Did I make it to London? Did I get what I was looking for?
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
I put off living, and now it’s too late.
They said my choices were foolish, that I was making a mistake. But I told them—I shouted it from the top of my lungs—there were other ways to die. Fear is the death of choice, and a mental death has to be just as agonizing.
I want to laugh at the irony, at my foolishness, but a mask covers my mouth. I want to laugh and laugh and laugh, but I don’t have it physically in me.
I wanted to live my life on my terms. I refused their fear when I should’ve listened because now it’s too late.
The lights blur bright against a pale-yellow ceiling. Machines beep as my mother wails that Ijust wouldn’t listen.
I feel fear. I feel anxiety. No, those don’t feel right. Enough. This thing I’m experiencing, it’s something else. Something stronger.
Doom.
The word comes to me with a cloaking of black.
My life is over before I get a chance to really live it.
Something brushes against my fingers, and I physically recoil at the sensation. It all happens so quickly, this sense of a happening from someplace else. Some other time and space. I inhale a life-filled gasp, my body jerking upright as though yanked by a force greater than my own.
Meoowwww.
I press my hand over my heart as I begin to laugh. I can feel it pounding under my skin—it’s still there, it’s working, I’m okay—as I glance down. Aunt Doreen’s ginger cat stares back at me through the gloom.
“Oh, it’s you.” I press one hand to his thick fur without moving the other from my still-racing heart.
Just a dream.
Just regret.
It’s not real.
10
WHIT
“You all right?”
Brin’s voice pulls my attention from my laptop, his long frame visible through the open door. He’s not dressed for the office, or maybe he is. He doesn’t work corporate and can often be found wearing jeans. More interesting than his outfit are the takeaway coffee cups in his hand. Two of them, not three.
“Am I…all right? Is that what you’re asking?” Amelia’s voice sounds hesitant. Meanwhile, I’m irrationally annoyed that I can’t see her, bar the brief flash of her hand, her shoulder, and the flick of her ponytail. How is it I’d never realized Jody’s desk is placed so inconveniently? Maybe because I never spent half the day trying to perve at Jody.
“Yeah,” Brin says with a delighted laugh. “It’s a greeting. Same as hello—how you doing? That sort of thing. I bet you’re ending phone calls wrong as well.”
“How are you supposed to end them? I saybyelike everyone else.”
“Everyone else who doesn’t live here, Mimi, love. The standard ending of a conversation in the UK goes a bit like this.” The idiot clears his throat. “Alright, that’s great, thanks very much, cheers, thanks again,bye!”
“You’re weird,” she says with a cute laugh. She’s not wrong, either. About him being weird. He’s also weirdly annoying.
“Says the one defiling British telephone etiquette. I’m surprised there haven’t been complaints.”
“Maybe there has been.” She lowers her voice. “It might be what’s put the monster in a bad mood.”
