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The doctors haven’t told us anything. If she’s brain dead, if she’ll wake up. If my heart should plan to keep on beating or just follow Ruby’s down.
Thirty minutes earlier, Ruby’s father and brother arrived. They barely paid me a passing glance before they rushed into her room. They must hate me. I hate myself.
Unable to take it any longer, I slam a fist against the wall. “Why aren’t they telling us anything?” I growl.
Davis’s head snaps to me, a snarl of warning on his lips.
I’m on thin ice as it is.
I lost it when we got to the hospital. When the nurses refused to let me see her, I started yelling. Security showed up. Then someone stuck me in the ass with a sedative, and my brothers manhandled me into a chair, and now we wait.
A security guard—the same one I tried to put a fist through hours ago for blocking me from Ruby’s room—turns in the hallway.
I glare at the guy. They’ll have to break every bone in my body and chop me up piecemeal if they think they’re going to get me to leave this hospital.
Sprawled out across two chairs, Wyatt sighs. “Charlie. Shut up.”
In two hard stomps, Davis is in front of me. “If you get your ass kicked outta here, how’s that going to help Ruby, huh?” My brother shoves me against the wall, staring fiercely into my eyes. He worked just as hard as I did to breathe life into Ruby. “Sit the fuck down.”
“If you fight in this goddamn hospital,” Ford says, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose. An empty coffee cup balances on the thigh of his blue jeans. “I will disembowel you fuckers.”
Too exhausted to argue, I drop into a chair beside Ford. I smear my face in my hands, keep them there.
My eyes and throat burn. Regret grates my insides. I didn’t protect her. I kept her on the ranch. I put her in danger. If I had let her go, she wouldn’t have been in the middle of this war with DVL. Ruby would be in California watching her sunset.
Instead, the woman I love the woman I need, my reason to keep breathing is hurt because I failed her.
A tear rolls down my cheek.
She can’t die. Something this pure, this good can’t go out.
It feels like the sun has been erased from the sky. Frommy heart. My entire fucking world. Gone.
Without her, I’m gone.
I lift my head, my eyes burning again as I stare at Ruby’s closed door. Everything that matters is in there. Nothing will calm me until I see her. The longer I’m kept from her the more I feel like some desperate, deranged man. I need to hear her voice, to hold her hand, to see her sweet smile. Christ. If she wakes up and I’m not there ...
If she wakes up.
My eyes land on the white ribbon tied around my wrist.
If.
An image of Ruby on the ground, cold and lifeless, smashes through my brain. Only there’s more. Vivid memories of this summer. Ruby. My sunflower. Her breathless laugh at night, her small hands on my beard, her murmuredI love youlike the softest prayer. Her wide-eyed wonder at the simplest things in life. The small gasps she made at night right before I devoured her mouth and held her tiny and warm in my arms.
Alive.
I can feel that hole inside of me, the one Ruby filled with her laughter and her smiles and her heart, emptying.
Emptying.
I don’t know who I’ll be without her. Happiness will become a fucking memory.
I could lose her.
Panic scrambles my brain.
Ruby died. Shedied.
