I press a hand to my forehead and pace to the far edge of the student lounge, away from Eli and the handful of others hovering by the vending machines. The room smells like lemon floor cleaner. Posters for anatomy review sessions curl at the corners on the bulletin board. Everything looks so normal that the word surgery feels like it belongs on another planet, except that I’m here to study surgery.
But this is real surgery.
Surgery on Henry.
“How… How bad was it?” I ask, even though she’s already told me the answer by saying emergency and awake now in the same breath.
“They relieved the pressure,” she says. “A small epidural hematoma and a fracture along the temporal bone. He’s lucky. Thank God for Zach. Henry’s prognosis is excellent. The doctor said minutes mattered.”
Minutes.
The last time I saw Henry, minutes didn’t matter. I made them not matter. I left him. Left him to pursue this opportunity. This seminar. And he didn’t want me. He wasn’t ready. Maybe I wasn’t ready either. But he’s the one who made the decision. The one who said we had no future.
And now his mother calls me about his accident.
Why would she call me?
Angie asked me some questions about Henry over the weekend, but no one else had a clue what was going on. At least I don’t think anyone did.
Which means…
“He’s been asking for you,” Marjorie says softly. “He fell asleep and woke up and asked again. I thought… I thought you should hear it from me.”
Something wedges in my throat. Heat rushes up my neck. My mind, traitor that it is, leaps to all the ways this could feel in reverse. What if I were the one in the bed and Henry the one standing at a threshold, deciding if I was worth giving something up for?
“Tabitha?” Marjorie asks. “Are you there?”
I look over at Eli. He’s pretending not to watch me, hands stuffed in his pockets, eyes on the floor.
“I’m here,” I say.
“Will you come?” she asks.
Everything in my body, my heart, my soul wants to say yes.
But my mind, the part of me that got me into this seminar—the part that kept reading last night after the police report, after the fear, after the mess—analyzes.
Dr. Landers.
A seat that wasn’t supposed to be open.
A month of mornings with tools and afternoons with cadavers.
A real taste of the future I’ve been clawing my way toward.
If I miss even a day at the beginning, I could spend the rest of the seminar trying to catch up and never quite do it.
I tighten my grip on the phone until my fingers ache. “Mrs. Simpson,” I say, and my voice comes out too formal. “I’m glad you called me. I am. And I’m so, so glad he’s awake, and that he’s going to be okay. But I got a place in a seminar that began today. I was on a waitlist, and they don’t usually let second-years in. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I?—”
“I understand,” she says, interrupting me. “You should focus on your studies.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and I mean it with everything in me.
Silence hums on the line, muted like the air right before that storm Thursday evening when Henry and I were trapped in the barn and…
“Would you like me to tell him anything?” she finally asks.
I don’t hear any condemnation or anger in her voice. Rather, I hear only understanding.
