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I looked towards the door, and Jack Lehaney stood there, eyes suspiciously bright.
“She is, or beginning to at least,” Jodie said softly, and a couple tears fell from her own eyes.
Jack came to stand by Stevie, and there was a kind of hope written on his face that I wished I could access. He already knew where he stood for the girl in the bed. He was a best friend, and when she woke up, he would love her, and she would love him. He didn’t need to worry anxiously about whether she’d still have him. I hated myself for not being able to just be proud of her, like he clearly was.
I didn’t want to be rude to Jodie or Jack, so I just told them I needed to think. For the first time since the accident, I went back to my house for more than the supplies I might need for a long-term stay in the hospital.
My house had changed a little bit. It was clean, for starters. There was a note on my door in handwriting that I recognized as Jonah’s, telling me to look after myself. I didn’t know when he’d left the paper there, but it was curling at the edges. I imagined him walking past it every time he got me things I needed. Jonah was expecting me to bounce back. He was my friend and knew me better than almost anyone else in the city. He was expecting all of this to blow over, like Stevie might be a temporary infatuation or her coma might not be as serious as all that. I wanted to tell him, so badly, that he was right. That I’d be okay, that I wasn’t going anywhere.
Even though I had planned to just spend some time thinking before I made any decisions, I sat on my sofa and stared at the ceiling. There was a suspicious prickling in my eyes, and before I knew what was happening, I was crying.
I hadn’t cried like that in a long time. Not since I was in high school, actually.
“Adrian,” my father said, “it’s—it’s Mom.”
I stared up at him, his brown eyes holding all the fear and insecurity that I felt. All the months of waiting. His lips were pressed so tightly together that they disappeared into his mouth, and I knew what he was trying to say because I’d known for months that the conversation we were about to have was inevitable.
But I would make him say it. Because there he was, sitting in front of me like there was nothing he could have done to prevent any of it. Maybe, one day, I would forgive him. I would understand that being a layman in the face of impossible news shuts down the part of your brain that needs you to think, to argue, to fight.
But I would never, as long as I lived, forgive the man that sat in the seat over from him. We were in an empty conference room, and I was as sure then as the day I’d met him that Dr. Aaron Christophers was a fraud. He claimed he cared, but I knew he was power-hungry, and the only reason he hadn’t taken a chance was in case she had died, on the table, under his care, before he could make a spectacle over the rarity of the illnesses that were spreading like wildfire through her body. I hoped he was happy, happy that his case study had been published nationally and that my very mother had been reduced to nothing more than an anonymous name in a medical journal.
“Say it, Dad,” I asked of him, and my voice was thick with the tears that I hadn’t let her see—not once in the months of her decline.
“She passed away, Adrian, last night. Her heart just couldn’t—”
“Bullshit,” I said calmly but firmly, and my father snapped his eyes up to mine.
That wasn’t the kind of language you heard from your perfect son every day.
“What?”
“It’s bullshit,” I said, choosing the boiling anger over the tears that were threatening to fall. “Mom was dead the moment we stepped in here, and he,” I jabbed a finger in Aaron Christophers’ direction, “decided that not operating on her would make for a better article!”
I didn’t wait to hear my father’s answers, Dr. Christophers’ excuses. Instead, I rose to my feet, stalked out of the room, and strode down the halls of the hospital until I was well and truly lost. I didn’t care who saw me, and I didn’t care what they thought. Awful things happened every day in hospitals, and if a crying teenager was the biggest of their concerns, then I envied them.
I let the tears fall onto my carpet and held my head in my hands. What if she died? Her body, broken and bruised, a c-spine holding her stable, and her beautiful curls soaked in blood came to mind. She had almost died that night, and what was I really waiting for? If I chose her, I would always have the fear of injury, or sickness, ordeathhanging over my head.
I could choose my career, like Aaron wanted me to, but would I be able to work alongside Stevie everyday and pretend like nothing had ever happened between us? I’d tried that once before, and it had led to her accident.
I pulled out my phone and rang the only person that could help me.
* * *
I opened my door to see Melissa standing there.
Her eyes were bright and shiny, excited, and her cheeks were flushed. Her blonde hair was tied up in a ponytail, and she was dressed in running gear.
“Did she wake up?” Melissa asked before even greeting me.
Of course, she would ask—Melissa was selfless. I shook my head, though, and invited her in.
“I just wanted to talk,” I muttered.
She stepped over the threshold and made a comment about how much cleaner the house looked than the last time she’d been there. I pointed out that it was a tendency of Jonah’s to clean when stressed, and then, we were silent. Melissa perched on my sofa, and I paced in front of the coffee table, letting the air grow silent and stale.
“Just say it,” She demanded suddenly, and I looked at her. “Ade, I know you called me over here to break up, and really, I’m not mad.”
“You’re not?”
