“Yeah, I get that. See, we’re alike that way. I know how it is. How that first one takes you over an edge. Makes you numb to the rest and then it’s all, hell, what’s one more?” Lonny bared his teeth and jerked Emily’s head back hard, blood trickling down her neck. “Now put. The gun. Down.”
TJ lowered his arms and Lonny relaxed by a fraction. But I knew something Lonny didn’t. TJ didn’t care about Emily anymore. She’d become expendable to him the minute he’d seen the photo of her and Vince.
I braced myself. A cold hand slipped under the hem of my jeans and gripped my ankle. A minty calm that wasn’t mine poured through me, cooling the instinct to duck or run. Confidence flowed through me and whispered “Trust me.”
TJ turned, lightning quick, and leveled the gun at my head. Even twenty feet away, it felt like a solid cold pressure against my skull, but I didn’t flinch. I stared down the barrel as he said, “You’re right. It does make it easier.”
TJ pulled the trigger.
Lonny shouted.
Something rushed at me, stealing my breath.
Pain ripped through my skull.
And my world faded to black.
44
It’s strange, the things you remember, but more so the things you forget. I didn’t remember the arrival of the police or the ambulances in the cemetery. I didn’t remember the handcuffs clicking shut over TJ’s and Emily’s wrists.
What I did remember was a voice. A frantic and desperate voice, calling my name over and over. A voice I could almost touch with the tip of a finger before the darkness swallowed me whole.
I awoke in an itchy hospital bed. The room was dark, curtains drawn over the window. Electronic monitors beeped near my head. The only clock in the room said it was four. Day or night, I didn’t know.
My eyes adjusted, and I saw Mom asleep in a chair at the foot of my bed.
A nurse padded into the room.
“Oh, good. You’re awake,” she whispered. She wrapped her fingers around my wrist and watched the second hand drift over the clock. Her touch was soothing, like warm herbal tea, and she smelled like baby powder. “How are you feeling?” She checked the monitors and took some notes on a clipboard.
“My head hurts.” I prodded a tender line of prickly threads in my hair.
“You’ve got quite a few stitches back there.” The nurse poured water into a foam cup and held the straw while I struggled to sit up. The effort left me nauseated and dizzy. “I’m giving you something intravenously for pain. You probably feel a little fuzzy.”
I set my head back against the pillow. The last thing I remembered was TJ’s gun. I recalled with sickening clarity the hideous expression on his face when he pulled the trigger. And the peculiar calm before everything exploded.
“Reece!” I sat up too fast. A blinding pain paralyzed me and I breathed slowly through my mouth to keep from being sick. The nurse rushed to settle me.
“Your friends are fine,” she coddled, smoothing my panic and straightening my blankets.
“But Reece?”
“They’re all fine. You just sleep now.” She rested her warm baby powder hand on mine. The pulse monitor slowed, my heart beating steadily. All fine . . . But how?
“Should I wake her?” The nurse inclined her head toward my mother. “She’s been here all day. She refused to leave you. I brought her a nicotine patch and a mild sedative to settle her nerves. She finally fell asleep about an hour ago.”
I looked at my mother more closely. She wore secondhand sweatpants, her hair in a sloppy ponytail, and my favorite hoodie draped across her like a blanket. Her naked lids were outlined in dark circles and painted with worry. She could have been anyone’s mom—a normal, tired, worried-sick mom—but she was mine.
As if she could feel me watching, she stirred and her eyes blinked open.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” said the nurse, and she quietly padded back out.
My mother sat up and looked at me with an anguished expression. She inched forward in her seat, hesitant and awkward, as if she wanted to touch me, but she wasn’t sure how. “When the police came to the house and told me what happened, I thought I’d lost you.” She swallowed and took a shaky breath. “It was my fault. I should have told you everything from the beginning. I was just so afraid you’d go looking for him. That you’d leave.” She was crying now. Big, heaving sobs that left streaks down her face. “Losing David was terrible, but I managed. But losing you? I could never imagine surviving a loss like that. I told myself I’d never be able to let you go. But it was wrong. I was wrong. You’re so smart and so grown-up. I should have trusted you to make your own choices.” Her hands shook as she pressed them to her lips, fighting back tears.
I reached for her, held my hand out in the space between us. She looked at it, and then to me. And then she placed her hand in mine. I shut my eyes and felt all the love that had always been there, that I had never let myself feel before. All those things I’d thought my father had taken with him when he left. Everything I needed was here, inside her. “I’m sorry,” I said, letting my own tears fall, “if I made you feel like you weren’t enough.”
She leaned in and placed a delicate kiss on my forehead and a hand over my heart. Her pride—her adoration—was a burst of sweet citrus inside me. “You are, and will always be, your very own person, Nearly. Everything you’ll ever need is right in here.” She straightened and wiped her eyes. They were red and wet, but creased with smile lines. “I’m going to the cafeteria to find us some junk food. The fat to calorie ratios in this place are seriously disappointing.”
We laughed the same laugh. And it felt good.
The door swished shut behind my mom, and then swished open again. The baby powder nurse poked her head in and smiled.
“There’s a rather handsome dark-haired gentleman waiting to see you. I told him he couldn’t come in until you were feeling up for it. If you want me to ask him to wait . . .”
“No!” I said, louder than I’d intended. “It’s fine. He can come in.” The nurse helped me elevate the bed and then padded out the door to find my visitor. I wished I had a toothbrush, and I struggled with the IV tubes while I worked my weak fingers through the snarls in my hair, exhausted by the small effort.
The door finally cracked open, and light spilled in from the hall. Every nerve in my body crackled, until Oleksa peeked his head in and surveyed the room. I sunk back into my pillows. He lifted a swollen and bruised brow, as if asking permission to come in. Gena followed, her fingers laced through his, wearing matching badges on lanyards around their necks.
The lanyard rose and fell with Oleksa’s chest and my eyes flew open wide, remembering the bullet that ripped through it. How was he still breathing? TJ had shot him in the back right in front of me. I couldn’t have imagined it.
“You’re alive?”
“Kevlar.” He tapped a fist over his chest and winked. “I’m bulletproof.” The warmth was completely foreign on the cold face I’d been terrified of for weeks. As was the mysterious disappearance of his heavy Ukrainian accent. Hints of it lingered in his clipped consonants, but his dialect was as relaxed as his smile.