Page 47 of The Delivery

Warming her hands around her mug, she thinks about everything her tree has seen. She’d read somewhere that pines can live over five hundred years.

A hand comes down on her shoulder, and she starts, coffee spilling over the lip, singeing her knuckles. Whipping around, she sees Mark.

“You didn’t hear me?” he asks. “I called your name.”

He is dressed for work.

She tents her fingers over the top of the mug so she can shake her other hand. “Sorry. Lost in thought.”

“Derek called,” Mark says. “He needs to see me immediately.”

“You can tell Derek—”

“Not like that,” Mark says. “He’s at the hospital. He was nearly killed last night.”

It sweeps through her now, a black wave of despair.

This nightmare, it seems, has not ended.

It is only beginning.

Chapter 34

Derek is spiderweb ensnared in the hospital bed, wrapped in cords and bandages and lines. From what Mark can gather at first glance, Derek is plugged into a heart monitor, a pulse oximeter, a blood pressure cuff, two IVs, and drainage tubing. Or they are plugged into him. It’s hard to tell which way the system flows; he looks like a cyberhuman, like Luke Skywalker in the bacta tank. Derek’s eyes are groggy from drugs, his lids pouched. His normally coifed hair is matted, his face crusty from sleep, and he is too drugged and traumatized to remember to ask Mark about strep throat.

Mark has never seen him less than shiny. In fact, with the Teflon exterior scraped off, he looks profoundly mortal.

He continues on in a rasp, his vocals still shot from the intubation. “Thought I was gonna die. Sparkly glow, tunnel of light, all that.”

Mark draws close to the bed. “You didn’t see who yanked the hose?”

Derek’s head rolls back and forth on the pillow, a weary no. “Random act of violence. You know how this city’s getting.”

Mark’s insides are boiling with suspicion, paranoia, and fear, but he contains himself. “Where’s Alexa?”

Derek takes a long blink. He looks like a lost little boy. “She came last night. Had to get home. To sleep, you know. Needs to stay strong with me in here.”

But he cannot hide his loneliness, the terrible vulnerability writ large across his face.

“I’m sorry,” Mark says, because he cannot think of anything else to say. And he realizes that it is more than a knee-jerk response, that he actually means it.

“Missed my femoral artery by this much.” Derek lifts a trembling hand and measures a few millimeters between his thumb and a forefinger made bulbous by the pulse ox. “Nerve damage, they said.” His words slightly blurry. “Vascular injury needs another surgery.”

“But you’re gonna be okay?”

“Won’t be getting back to kickboxing anytime soon.”

“How long are you out?”

“Two, three weeks,” Derek says. “’S why I asked you here.”

Mark looks at him, puzzled.

“I know we’ve had our differences.” Derek’s forehead is tight with concentration, the way Maddy’s gets sometimes. It is taking all his focus to speak. “And I never realized how much I can count on you. Not until I was lying here thinking about who needs to take the reins on product operations while I’m out.”

Mark knows that Derek is right, that he is the best choice to get the company back on track, but he cannot believe that he is hearing it from Derek.

Derek makes a weird noise. It takes a moment for Mark to identify it as a whimper.