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She changed out the bag on his IV drip. Then she pulled out a small light from her breast pocket, clicked it on, and opened his right eye. “You know, a lot of the nurses are gonna miss the steady stream of cute firemen coming through he—”

She paused.

She opened his other eye and shone the light into his pupil. She cleared her throat as she clicked the light off and slipped it back in her pocket. “We sure are going to miss you guys.” She picked up his chart.

She didn’t look at me. Her tone changed. Her body changed. I’d done that change myself on the scene of a call.

Something is wrong.

“What is it?”

She didn’t answer me.

I pulled out my cell phone and turned on the flashlight. I leaned over Brandon and opened his eye while Valerie watched me wordlessly.

My breath caught in my throat. “No. No! ”

I looked at the other eye, and my hands started to shake. I stumbled back from the bed and knocked into my chair, dropping my cell phone to the floor with a clatter.

Valerie looked at me, and we exchanged a moment of understanding.

His pupils were blown.

They were large black marbles in his eyes.

THIRTY-SIX

Kristen

When the phone rang, I groped for it on the nightstand. It was the hospital. And it was also 3:57 in the morning. I brushed the hair off my forehead and sat up. “Hello?”

“Kristen.”

It was Josh. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t any Josh I’d ever heard.

“Kristen, you need to go get Sloan. Brandon’s had a stroke.”

I threw off my covers. “What? A stroke? What does that mean?”

I tumbled out of bed and stumbled around the room, grabbing my bra and jumping into leggings.

He paused. “He’s brain-dead. He’s not coming back from this. It’s over. Get Sloan.”

The line went dead.

I stood in the middle of my dark room. The phone stayed lit for a moment. When the screen went back to black, I was doused in pitch.

The velociraptor roared, and the ground shook as it lunged forward.

As I drove to Sloan’s, I had the surreal, almost out-of-body realization that I was about to tell my best friend the worst news of her life. That the moment she answered that door, I was going to break her heart and she would never be the same.

My altered state allowed me to process this in a compartmentalized way. I knew that I wouldn’t feel the painful moment when it happened, but that I’d put it into a little box and take it out and look at it often for the rest of my life.

* * *

I watched Sloan die inside that night.

They called it a catastrophic stroke. A blood clot moved from the wounds in his leg up to his brain. It had probably happened while Josh sat with him. It was silent and final, and there was nothing anyone could have done.