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“What the fuck.” His voice is as strained as it was in those early days. “Oh my God, Gabriel.”
“I’m fine.” I can feel Remy hovering, worrying, so I gesture to her to get closer.
The bed dips, and she scooches in, one hand soft on my shoulder. “You’re, like, not fine, Gabriel. You’re in the hospital.”
My sister’s voice shakes. It shook that way on the first day of school, when she had to start second grade with none of her friends. I remember her hand in mine outside the big, metal doors. I remember crouching down, lightheaded from a night of no sleep and men in dark corners.Everybody’s going to love you. I’ll be here when school gets out.
“I’m okay. I didn’t break anything.”
Mason takes a deep breath, then lifts his head away and looks at my face. Remy leans in for a hug. They both feel…solid. I spent so long thinking they were an inch from collapse. Now I’m the one in the hospital bed.
“Painkillers?” Mason asks.
“I said I didn’t break anything.”
He scoffs, swiping at tears in his eyes that he’s apparently going to ignore. “Everything hurts, doesn’t it?”
My oldest brother would know. “Yeah. But I’m high. There’s an IV and everything, so it’s not so bad.”
“Jesus.”
“How did younotbreak anything?” Remy curls up next to me like she’s still seven, careful not to put any pressure on my body. “Jameson said it was a hard fall.”
“It was.” I feel an aftershock again. Milder now that there are drugs. “Better than staying in the building.”
The muscles around Mason’s mouth waver. “I’m going to ask them for another scan.”
“I don’t need one.”
“You have to have brokensomething.”
“Maybe he had a guardian angel.” Remy sits up, presses the heels of her hands to her eyes, and lets out a long breath. “Softened his fall somehow.”
Mason’s eyes go to her, and I can see him hesitating. “Maybe.”
The guardian angel theory has some painful implications, if you think about it. If Remy means our parents, then they couldn’t have cushioned Mason’s fall, because it’s very likely that they were still alive when my dad pushed him out that window.
Interesting. That pain’s dulled, too. I know it’s sharp as hell, somewhere out there at the edges of the drugs, but it’s not so in my face.
“Remy, I have to talk to Mason.” She takes her hands down, her teeth digging into her lip. “For a minute.”
“Okay. I’ll go stand with Charlotte, then. And I’ll get the updates you wanted from the nurse.” Remy puts on a stern expression. “Donotjump out of any more buildings. Ever.”
“I don’t plan on it.”
She eases herself off my bed and goes to the corner of the room where Charlotte and Elise are talking, their arms around each other. When Remy gets close, Charlotte pulls her right into their circle. Remy shakes her head.
“I know.” Sympathy is written all over Charlotte’s sunshine face. “I know.”
Mason glances over at them, and when he turns back to me, I’m struck by how drawn he looks. How distressed. When our parents died, I thought it was grief. I knew it was, because I felt it too. But it was all of us, wasn’t it? It was the same worry I felt about him.
I was wrong. I thought moving out and away would stop him from worrying about me, or convince him to worry less.
He hasn’t stopped. He’s never going to stop. Not because he thinks I can’t live on my own, or because he thinks of Jameson and Remy and me as some kind of burden.
It’s because he’s my brother. He might’ve worried about us even if our parents had lived.
Would he?An oily voice poses the question in the back of my mind.Would he worry if he knew the whole story? If he knew what you did? Or would you disgust him?
