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As we’d boarded the flight, Rose was able to get a hold of Aunt Callie, but she didn’t have any more news for us. My dad was in surgery and they didn’t know when he’d be done.
We just had to wait. Wait and worry. Switch planes. Call home again. I finally got in touch with my brother, but he didn’t have anything new to tell me, and his voice sounded off, like he was carefully planning his words. He told me that he was sitting in the waiting room with everyone else and hadn’t been updated in hours. My mom was somewhere in the bowels of the hospital waiting for my dad’s surgery to be over, but unsurprisingly, no one had seen her in a while.
The next flight was longer. Rose played games on her tablet, but I couldn’t seem to do anything but stare at the seatback in front of me. I ignored her attempts at conversation and the new romance novel she dropped in my lap.
I couldn’t focus. I could barely breathe. The longer it took to get us home, the harder it got to wait. I needed to be there. I needed to hold my mom’s hand and reassure her. I needed to make sure someone had called Cecilia because I didn’t even have her new phone number.
I needed to get off that fucking plane.
Eight hours later, my hair was greasy, my stomach was churning, and my hands were shaking as we taxied down the runway to our final gate.
“Lil,” Rose said quietly, turning her head slowly to face me. “I didn’t tell you everything.”
I stopped breathing.
“Your dad,” she grimaced. “He was driving Ashley home from a party at the club.”
“What?”
“Leo’s Ashley.”
The in-flight soda I’d choked down threatened to come back up.
“She didn’t make it,” Rose said softly.
“What?” I asked again, dumbly. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“He wasn’t drinking and my mom said that he offered to take her home since she was pretty blitzed and didn’t want to stay the night.”
It felt like a betrayal. The emotion hit me so hard that I had to deliberately hold back a gasp. I’d spent so much time pretending like she didn’t exist, like neither of them existed, but my family had clearly been close to them and I’d never known. I’d made my opinion clear about any news on Leo, but I still couldn’t believe that my parents maintained some sort of relationship I didn’t know about.
I didn’t say any of that out loud. I couldn’t. She was dead. She was dead and my dad was in the hospital, and my hurt feelings didn’t matter to anyone. Guilt hit me hard as I realized how very self-centered my reaction was.
Somewhere at the end of our flight was a child without its mother. Leo, a man that I’d tried and failed not to love, had lost someone important to him. I didn’t know if they were together, though I always assumed they would be, but even that didn’t matter. She was the mother of his baby. He must be devastated.
I closed my eyes, deliberately picturing Leo’s face for the first time in years, and fought tears as my chest tightened with a sob. It was awful, all of it, and for the first time in a long time, I wanted my mom.
When we finally made our way out of the airport and into the Oregon rain, my uncle was waiting. He didn’t say much, that wasn’t his style, but he pulled us in for a group hug the minute he saw us and held us tightly for a long moment. His big arms and solid chest were the most comforting thing I’d felt since I’d woken up that morning, and I swallowed down the lump in my throat as he let us go.
“You girls hungry?” he asked as he threw our bags in the trunk.
“We can eat at the hospital,” I said, not even glancing his way as I climbed into the backseat.
It only took seconds before he and Rose were climbing in the front, but it felt like an eternity.
The scene at the hospital was exactly like I’d imagined. Aces stood around, filling the tiny waiting room on the surgical floor, while their wives and girlfriends sat in small clusters of chairs talking quietly. I let my eyes flicker over every face as we got off the elevator, but I didn’t meet anyone’s eyes until my brother, Cam, took a step away from the wall he’d been leaning on.
My entire body sagged as he moved toward me on steady feet, his boots making little noise as he crossed the floor. I let out a breath of relief when he hugged me tight.
“Dad’s out of surgery,” he said quietly, his hand smoothing down the back of my hair as I shook. “Mom came out and updated us just a little while ago. She told me to wait for you so I could bring you back when you got here.”
