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"What's wrong, Daddy?" I asked.
He dropped to his knees and opened his arms, taking both of us into his warm, safe embrace. "It will be okay. You need to go back to bed. I have to go out for a bit. Mary will stay with you."
"I want you to stay, Daddy," Dani said.
"I'll be back soon," he promised. "Take care of Brynn."
"I will," Dani replied, always happy to be in charge.
"I want to go with Daddy," I said when he walked away.
"You can't," Dani told me.
"I want Mommy," I added.
"Me, too," Dani said, meeting my gaze. "But we have to be strong, Brynn. We can't cry. Let's go to bed."
We went into our room. Instead of getting into her bed, Dani got into mine. I needed her near me, because the fear was overwhelming, and I didn’t want to be alone.
As memories of the past swamped me now, I felt tears gather in my eyes. I'd never seen my mother again.
For almost a week, Dani and I thought our mom was just delayed in New Orleans because of the horrible storm that had hit the city. Eventually, we'd been told that our mom had been caught in the hurricane, and that she'd gone to heaven.
I hadn't known what that meant. I just knew she wasn't going to be around anymore, and nothing would ever be the same.
I was right. Our lives changed drastically after my mom passed away. My father withdrew into a sad shell. He hired a nanny to take care of us and buried himself in work. Dani and I were the last people on his mind.
Four years later, Vicky married my dad. For a moment, I'd thought I might have a family again. But within six months, Vicky had talked my father into sending us to boarding school.
Neither of us wanted to go, but in some ways being away at school had been a relief. We didn't have to tiptoe around my dad or be super nice to Vicky. We could just be ourselves.
It was at boarding school where I'd really honed my musical skills. My mother had been a violinist, and I'd learned the basics from her before she'd died. But at boarding school, playing the violin had become my escape from reality, and I became very, very good at it.
After graduating from high school, Dani and I moved on to UCLA, where I started out in the music program but eventually changed my major to business, because Dani convinced me we needed to be practical and to be able to make our own way in the world. Dani and I were different in a lot of ways, but one thing we both hated was unpredictability, probably because of how drastically our life had changed in one night. We never wanted to feel out of control again.
But I felt that way now, and it was terrifying.
I would love for my mother to be alive.
On the other hand, if she wasn't dead, where the hell had she been all these years?
Did my dad know she was alive? Did Vicky?
The questions ran around in my head, the anxiety making me press down harder on the gas. Maybe when I got to the hospital, the answers would be right in front of me. I would see that the woman who had been shot was not my mother, that it was all a bizarre mistake, and my life could return to normal.
* * *
When I finally drove into the hospital parking lot, it was eight thirty at night. The rain had stopped, but it was cold and foggy, adding an eerie atmosphere to an already scary destination. Before getting out of the car, I checked my phone, seeing a stream of messages from Jeff, Ray, and my sister. There was also a voicemail from an Inspector Alan Greenman with the San Francisco Police Department asking me to call him back as soon as possible. That had to be about my mother, or the woman who people thought was my mother.
I left all the messages for later. I got out of the car and walked toward the lobby doors. Once inside, I was directed to the Intensive Care Unit on the fourth floor. The smell of medicine and bleach made my already queasy stomach turn over, but I pressed on.
When I reached the nurses' station, the woman who'd called me earlier, Kendra Miller, told me that my mother had come out of surgery and had been placed in a medical coma to give the injury to her brain a chance to heal. Apparently, she had been shot in the head and in the shoulder. Her condition appeared to be stable at the moment, but it was too early to know whether she had suffered any brain damage.
While I listened as carefully as I could, my heart was beating so fast that I could barely concentrate. And when Nurse Miller led me down the hall, panic rose within me.
With every step I took, my need to run increased. I didn't know what I was doing here or why I was by myself. I couldn't do this on my own. I should have told Dani. I could feel my fingers tingling. I wanted to reach for my sister's hand. I wanted her to be at my side. I wanted us to face this together. But I'd left her out of it. I'd chosen to protect her from this stressful situation. It had been the right decision, but still…
The nurse waved me into the room. I drew in a breath and moved forward. The person in the bed was hooked up to machines and tubes. It took a long minute for me to let my gaze slide up her body and settle on her face.
