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He’s clammy, panicked, way too pale.
Dark circles surround his eyes like sickly halos.
I’ve never seen my father like this, and it’s scary as hell.
“It’s Evie, Delia. Thompson, he found her downstairs on the floor a few minutes ago,” he gasps out, his voice ringing with confusion.
My brows knit together. Thompson is our main security guy who patrols the house on graveyard shift.
“Dad?” I reach for his hand and try to squeeze it reassuringly. “What do you mean 'found her?' Did you call 9-1-1?”
“They’re on their way and she’s—she’s not breathing!” He spins angrily, slamming his fist on the wall.
Holy shit!
I grab his shoulder, trying to calm him down. My brain skips back to all the emergency training you get in high school, but never pay much attention to because you don’t expect you’ll ever need it.
“Let’s go back downstairs! And start at the beginning,” I urge, trying to pull him by the hand.
“If they don’t get here in time... If...if anything happens to her, I swear to God...” A sob chokes him as he lurches along, barely keeping up with me.
This time we’re moving, marching to the end of the hall and piling into the elevator in a blinding storm of fury and terror.
“Jesus, Delia, it’s bad. I don’t know, I don’t know what happened. She was passed out before I ran down for the alert. They just found her, passed out, barely breathing. I nodded off in the library earlier... I thought she was upstairs in our room, doing her yoga routine or taking a bath. I came upstairs a little while ago and I heard these odd noises, but...” He sighs so sadly it makes my heart hurt. “Her lungs aren’t working. Something’s very wrong.”
My belly tightens, wanting to crawl up my throat when he talks about the noises in the night. He’s probably too shocked by what’s happening to realize it was coming from my room.
Stop it,I tell myself.This is no time to be selfish.
We need to make sure this woman doesn’t die.
Yeah.
The thought of having Evie as a ghost, haunting us forever, makes me want to move into the crappiest high-rent apartment in the city.
But I can’t worry about stupid things like that right now.
Dad tears out of the elevator the instant the doors open, skittering over to the small, slim shape on the floor. Two security guys are bent over her, elevating her legs, checking her vitals.
She’s not her usual high-class put together self.
Evie looks like a rumpled mess—more like a fragile doll than a human being—half dressed in her open, wrinkled robe.
“Come on, dammit. Come the fuck on!” Dad snaps, pushing through the guards.
He drops to the floor, banging his knees so loudly they click. He goes to work, trying his best at CPR.
I’m frozen, hurting, unsure what to do.
There’s nothing in the good daughter’s playbook for what happens when your wicked stepmother blacks out cold.
Dad rarely swears, and he never lets such harsh, bright tears brim in his eyes, overflowing down his red, panicked cheeks.
He’s covering her mouth with his now, pouring every molecule of oxygen in his lungs into her, pumping his hands on her chest so hard I worry he’ll accidentally break ribs.
It won’t take much.
Jesus, I think she’s lost more weight during the time I’ve been away. She looks like a mummy with one too many plastic surgeries.
