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Something is bad wrong.
I’m jostled from either side as the two nurses from before rush past me to get to her.
“Help!” she demands of them as she points a shaking hand at me. “Call the police! This man—Lowell! Robert Edmund Lowell! He—” she lets out an abrupt sob, her features crumpling with very real grief, “—he hurt me! I was just a girl! Just a teenage girl! And he—he—”
“Nadine!” Meg Ryan’s lookalike says loudly. “Nadine, you’ve got it wrong, sweetheart! That’s not who you think it is!”
Lolly’s fury erupts back into existence, and she glares at me with hellfire in her eyes. “No! I would know that bastard anywhere! It’s him! I know his face!I know his face!”
I shake my head again and finally get out, “Lolly, it’s me, Landon!”
“Liar!”
“I’m Landon, your gr—”
Rae’s popsicle-stick coaster comes spinning through the air at me. Instinct hurries me out of its path, and it hits the wall behind me with a shattering crack. “Get out! I told you to never come around me again!Get out, goddamn it!”
“I’m your grandson!” I nearly yell, desperate, my heart pounding with horror. “I’m Landon! I’m not Rob—”
“LIAR!” she bellows. She grabs the arm of the other nurse. “He’s lying! I don’t have a grandson! Call the police!Please!”
I’ve—fuck.
Fuck.
I’ve been kicked in the chest.
At least, that’s how it feels.
My heart has stopped beating.
The air has been forced out of my lungs.
“Should we stick her?” I hear the nurse ask.
Meg Ryan’s lookalike turns to me. “You should just go.”
I blink. Feel my heart take off on a new panicked sprint. Draw a breath so painful it’s like I’m inhaling shards of glass.
I look at Lolly.
She looks at me, too, then wails and looks away again, lost in memories of being harmed by someone who she thinks is me.
She doesn’t know the me I really am.
She doesn’t know I’m—
“Landon!” the nurse all but snaps as Lolly grows louder and even more distraught. “Now, please!”
I drop the flowers and whirl around. I’m out of the room in a second.
A horrible feeling invades me, like I’m empty and also full of razorblades.
I stride down the hall to the elevators, my footfalls heavy on the tile floor. My ears buzz with the way Lolly screamed and shouted, and the things she said, and the silence I hear now that I’ve left her.
It takes forever to get to the ground floor with the number of people entering and exiting the elevator—I live the rest of my life and die an old man in this fucking elevator. Then I’m alive and young again, running out the glass doors I came in through, flinging myself into the driver’s seat of my car.
My mouth is dry, my throat aching.
