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Is that directed toward my brother or me?
I hold the device to my ear. "Hey."
"Don't you hey me, Lilly Ann," Nate's barked tone comes through the earpiece, and I automatically scrunch my shoulders up. "What the fuck happened?"
"Uh..." My own anger shrivels to the size of a dried raisin. Why is he so mad?
"George calls me out of a meeting with an investor, informing me that he heard a thud upstairs, and when he went to check it out, he found you unresponsive on the floor. I'm asking you again. What the fuck happened?"
I cover the speaker and hiss, "Why on earth did you have to call him out of a meeting?"
This time, George's expression does change—and not in a friendly way. "Because it took me five minutes to get you to move, let alone react. I was about to call an ambulance."
My heartbeat seems to slow. Five minutes?
"Oh."
"Yes, ‘Oh!’" Nate scoffs on the other end. He gentles his tone. "Tell me what happened, please."
"I had another migraine," I mumble.
"But you never passed out before," my brother states, wanting confirmation.
"No."
"What did you remember?" George inserts himself, and I put the phone down on the kitchen island, pressing the speaker button. "It was about Emily and Brooks."
I recall everything, including what I saw in the café and how Emily dragged me by the arm.
"Could they just have been arguing?" my brother questions, still convinced their affair was ongoing until his mother's death.
I shake my head, not that Nate sees it. "I don’t think so." Brooks’s face appears in front of my mind’s eye. "Brooks looked..."—I struggle for the right word—"almost desperate. Like Emily shut him down on something. I don’t know, Nate. I was scared."
"Scared of whom?" George pulls my attention to his face.
I scan every inch of the man's features. Between his menacing glare and the scar, he can terrify everyone without saying a word, yet I've never felt as afraid as when I sat there between my parents.
"I don’t know," I admit. "Maybe of what they were fighting about? Why can’t I hear anything in these memories?"
"I will make sure to ask Lakatos that."
"Speaking of..." Nate interrupts my stare-down with George. "I want you to see a neurologist."
My gaze shoots to the phone. "What? Why?"
"It's one thing to have headaches with these flashbacks, but passing out is a whole different story. We need to make sure there is nothing...uh, missed."
Missed? Like something is not right with my brain? What else could be wrong with my head? I’ve already lost years of my memory. Black spots appear in my vision just as another possibility strikes me like one of the migraines itself. "You think I have a tumor?" My eyes widen in horror as my voice goes three octaves higher. They'd crack open my skull and literally rearrange everything inside, not just figuratively. What if it’s terminal? I don’t want to—
Nate interrupts my internal rant. "It needs to get checked out. We'll make the necessary arrangements for the day after George gets back. I want him to talk to Lakatos first. See if that is something he knows about and is...normal."
I cover my face with my hands.
Why is this happening to me?
"We should talk to Tristen."
My hands instantly drop, the panic of something growing in my brain forgotten, and I stare at the man in front of me.
