A sound tears out of me, low and raw, dragged up from somewhere I’ve spent years sealing off. My shoulders hitch, and another breath comes in crooked and useless. I press my mouth harder against the blanket, but it doesn’t stop the noise—it only muffles it into something animal and unrecognizable.
My chest convulses, and my lungs refuse to cooperate. Tears spill hot and relentless, soaking into the cotton beneath my cheek. I clutch at his hand as if I might lose him if I loosen my grip even slightly, like the machines around us are the only thing holding him tethered to this world, and I am somehow responsible for keeping them working.
“I can’t do this,” I choke, though I don’t know if I mean the illness, the fear, or the waiting. “I can’t watch you disappear.”
The monitors keep their steady rhythm.
My body trembles through wave after wave until the force of it drains out, leaving only the dull ache of the aftermath. The sobs thin to ragged inhales. The tears slow but don’t stop. I stay curled beside him with my forehead pressed into the mattress, because the second I lift my head and look at him properly, this becomes real… and I’m not ready for that yet.
Eventually, the shaking fades into smaller aftershocks. I drag air into my lungs and hold it there until the dizziness passes. My sleeve is damp when I swipe at my face, and my eyes burn.
I sit back up because there is nothing else to do.
His chest rises, then falls.
I stare at the movement like it’s the only thing that matters.
“Okay,” I whisper, though the word feels fragile as glass. “Okay.”
Suddenly, the door opens. I turn, expecting a nurse, and find Deek, Will’s older brother. He’s still in his cut, which means he came straight from wherever he was, and there’s something about him as he steps into the room that is slightly different from the carefree Deek I know. He’s a fraction less easy, a fraction more careful, in the way someone moves when they have been standing still for a while and are deciding how to begin again. He meets my eyes, and for just a moment, his expression does something complicated that he smooths over quickly, something shifting behind the familiar grin that surfaces to replace it.
“Hey.” He exhales like he’s been holding his breath the entire drive. “How’s your dad?”
“Stable,” I say. My voice is wrecked, and I don’t try to pretend otherwise.
Deek nods slowly, looking at my father, and his throat works once. Then he pulls up the other chair, the one against the wall, sets it beside mine, and sits down in it like he intends to stay, which I already know he does, because this is what Deek does. He stays. Beneath all the commentary and the running jokes, beneath the bravado and the weaponized cheerfulness, he completely stays.
“Sin said you called,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Glad you did.” He rests his forearms on his knees, eyes forward on my father’s face. “Figured you shouldn’t be alone in a hospital at three in the morning if I could help it… my brother would kill me if I didn’t step up and help out his girl.”
‘His girl.’
I look at the side of his face. He is watching Dad with an expression I have seen on very few people in my life, one that recognizes the quality of this kind of vigil, the weight of sitting beside someone who is here and may not always be.
“Thank you,” I simply say.
Deek nods once and doesn’t say anything else, and we sit there together under the harsh fluorescent light, machines humming, darkness pressed up against the window, and I’m grateful down to my core that I’m not alone in the room.
Chapter Twenty-One
WILL
Later That Day
The legal visit room is cramped as hell, barely enough space for the table, three chairs, and the heavy atmosphere baked into places built for bad news, bad choices, and people running out of options.
The walls are painted the color of something that was once white and has spent too long becoming some other shade of who knows what. There is a single strip of fluorescent light overhead that hums at a frequency designed, seemingly, to make every thought feel slightly more exhausting than it already is.
I’ve been in here twice before. Both times with my attorney, running through the charges, walking through the evidence, mapping the territory we’re dealing with. Both times I left with a clearer picture of the machinery closing around me and a steadier grip on the certainty, the deep, unshakeable certainty, that none of this is what they’re saying it is.
Today I sit with my hands flat on the table and watch my attorney, a sharp woman named Diane Pryor, who Sin retained within six hours of my arrest and who communicates almost exclusively in clean, declarative sentences, set a phone down in front of me.
“This came through a secure channel,” she says. “From your club’s tech associate. He was specific about how it needed to reach you. I’ve verified the chain of custody.”
She doesn’t say anything else. Just folds her hands over the folder in front of her and watches me with that practiced blank expression people get when they’ve delivered the message and know the fallout isn’t their problem anymore.
