I don’t move.
Fuck, how am I going to walk away from her after everything. It’s what she wants, I should respect that, but it’s far from what I want.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s a text from Lucas.
Heard about the tornado. Are you okay? Call me ASAP.
I should answer him, but what would I say? That I survived a direct hit from a tornado only to have the woman I’m falling for blame me for destroying the last connection to her father? I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room despite being told in no uncertain terms that I’m not wanted here.
I pocket the phone without responding. I’ll call him when I have the emotional bandwidth to explain this mess.
“Are you Jonah?”
A woman appears in the doorway of the waiting room, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail that’s coming loose on one side. She shares Lila’s sharp cheekbones but has softer eyes, worry lines etched around them like faint scars. Her faded blue scrubs suggest she came straight from work. As I look up, she approaches, extending her hand, a silver bracelet glinting on her wrist. “I’m Emily. Lila’s sister.”
I take her hand, giving it a firm shake before she settles into the chair beside me, a sigh escaping her lips that seems to deflate her entire frame. The scent of antiseptic and stale coffee clings to her. “I wanted to thank you for calling me. I know she wouldn’t have wanted to worry me, but you made the right call.”
“Of course,” I say, shifting to face her. Max lifts his head at the movement, then settles it back on my shoe with a sigh. “She needed someone here for her.”
Emily studies me with the same direct gaze Lila has, though there’s something softer around the edges. “You stayed” she observes. “Even after what she said.”
My stomach tightens. “She told you.”
“Some of it.” Emily leans back in the vinyl chair, rubbing her temples. “Enough to know my sister was being...well, my sister.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I barely know Emily beyond our brief phone conversations, and I’m not sure how much Lila would want me to share about our complicated relationship. If we even have a relationship anymore.
“She’s always been like this,” Emily continues when I don’t respond. “When she’s hurting, she lashes out. Pushes people away before they can leave on their own.” She gives me a sideways look. “Dad was the only one who could really handle her when she got like that.”
“The truck,” I say quietly. “That’s what set her off.”
Emily nods, her expression clouding. “That truck was everything to her. Their special place.” She pulls at a loose thread on her scrubs. “After Dad died, she practically lived in it. Wouldn’t let anyone else drive it after she dumped every cent she had to rebuild it, wouldn’t sell it even when she needed the money to go to college. She kept it, and followed in his footsteps just to feel like she was close to him again.”
I think about Lila’s face when she saw the truck upside down, the complete devastation on her face. It was like watching something break in real time.
“I understand why she’s upset,” I say quietly.
Emily sighs, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. “Look, Jonah, my sister is...” she searches for the right word,“complicated. She doesn’t let people in easily. The fact that she’s this upset with you actually means something.”
“That she hates me?” I offer dryly.
“That she cares enough to be hurt.” Emily gives me a pointed look. “Lila doesn’t waste energy being angry at people who don’t matter to her.”
I consider this, turning the paper coffee cup in my hands. The logic seems backward, but there’s something about it that rings true. I’ve noticed how Lila dismisses most people with casual indifference. Her anger toward me was raw, emotional, unfiltered.
“So what now?” I ask. “She made it clear she doesn’t want me around.”
“Did she, though?” Emily tilts her head. “Or did she lash out because she’s terrified of how much she might need you?”
Something moves through my chest at the word need—a current I don’t have a name for, or maybe one I’ve been refusing to name. I think about the tornado, the two of us pressed into that bathtub with the walls coming apart around us, and how in those seconds I had said it out loud into the roar of it, not knowing if she could even hear me. The words had left my mouth and gone somewhere—into the noise, into the dark—and I had meant every syllable with a completeness I’d never felt about anything.
I look down at my hands. There’s plaster dust caught in the creases of my knuckles, a thin white line along my left index finger where the skin split against something in the debris. I press my thumb into it, not hard enough to hurt. Just enough to feel it.
“I don’t think that’s?—”
“You don’t know my sister like I do,” Emily interrupts, leaning closer. “When Dad died, she built walls so high that nobody else could scale them. Not me, not Mom, not her friends.Nobody.” She studies my face with unnerving intensity. “And then somehow you managed to climb over them.”
“I didn’t,” I protest, though the memory of Lila’s lips against mine in that bathtub as the tornado raged around us suggests otherwise. “We’re just research partners.”
