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“Your husband was involved in an accident today. As his emergency contact—”
Husband. Mrs. Foley.
My brain turns these words over, but everything is molasses. I’m not married. I’m not Mrs. Foley. Mrs. Foley is Timothy’s mother. His older sister who’s married—I don’t know if she took her wife’s name, so maybe not. It’s definitely not me.
Nic takes my phone. “She knows,” he snaps, ending the call.
This doesn’t make sense. But neither do the wordsTimothyandaccidentin the same sentence. He does risky shit all the time, but his luck is legendary.
Anger surges up in me and I turn on Nic. “What happened?” My voice is barely working, but he hears me. His face is dripping with sweat and he’s visibly shaking. He looks seconds from vomiting.
My panic snowballs.
Nic swallows. “He took a kick and it knocked him into a pole. Hit his head. He was…” His voice trails off as his eyes lose focus.
“He waswhat?”
He tugs at the collar of his shirt and swallows. “Different. A-angry. He threw up. I’m sorry, Mina—I can’t do this. I have to go.”
“No.” I lunge for him but he slips out of my grasp.
His eyes are wide and terrified, darting wildly over everything in the corridor. “Call me, let me know.”
I make one last attempt at grabbing him as he turns, but he evades me.
“Don’t leave me alone,” I shout after him, but he’s already gone.
“Mrs. Foley?”
I whirl at the voice behind me. A nurse is standing calmly, looking directly at me. My mouth opens to correct him, but if the hospital thinks I’m Timothy’s wife, they’ll tell me how he is and I’ll commit fraud to find out. “That’s me. I’m his”—I have to swallow before I can push the word out—“wife.”
“Your husband is in surgery,” he explains. “He had a bleed on his brain and they need to drain it to reduce the swelling. It’s a fairly straightforward procedure.”
I suck in a breath. Straightforward? It’s brain surgery!
The nurse keeps talking about the procedure, but I’m not following. I can’t think about how Timothy’s havingbrain surgery, so I get hung up on the one thing that doesn’t matter.
My husband.
Why do they think we’re married?
When the nurse pauses, I nod again because my words are stuck in my throat. They’re nothing more than a scream anyway.
“He was conscious when he came in, which is good. He was asking for you and you’ll be able to see him when he’s out of recovery. The doctors will want to talk to you after, but your husband was lucky to get here when he did.”
The nurse promises to update me and has me sign some paperwork. I remember to sign Mina Foley, but my hand shakes so much that it wouldn’t matter if I wrote Andrei instead. “Can I call someone for you?” he asks as he takes me to a waiting room.
I shake my head. I don’t want anyone—I want Timothy.
The waiting room is bland and I stare at an impressionist-style painting of a beach, clinging to my cracked phone like a lifeline. Time must pass, but my world is standing still. My heart is standing still. I’m waiting to find out if it will ever beat again.
My phone rings and I’m surprised and dismayed to find twenty minutes have passed. I perform some finger gymnastics to answer the call through the cracked screen—Timothy owes me a new phone if he makes it out of this.
Thatifmakes my voice crack when I answer. “Yeah?”
“Hey. How…how is he?”
Nic’s voice is rough, on the verge of breaking. I pinch the bridge of my nose and close my eyes for two seconds. “In surgery, you coward. Why did you leave?”
