“Do you have a timeline in mind?” Jonah asks, and Kate chuckles.
“I’m not the one with the timeline right now. It’s all in Kellan’s hands; he’ll wake up when he’s ready. Just keep talking to him. Be encouraging.” She puts her hands on her hips. “And don’t worry about anything downstairs. After last night, I’ve got some Watchers stationed at the front of the hospital. The Guard won’t be bothering us until he wakes up.”
The Guard?
I just can’t put the pieces together, because Jonah works extensively with the Guard. Karl and Zthane are good friends of his. His brother is a Guard, for crying out loud.
The Guard are not our enemies. Are they?
“Good,” Jonah replies, arms crossed against his chest.
“I’ll be back in an hour or so to check on Kellan,” Kate says. “Chloe is pretty much good to go, but I’m still going to recommend some more rest. Possibly,” she adds from the doorway, “until Kellan wakes up and is discharged.”
After she leaves, I grab Jonah’s arm and tug him closer. “My recovery is contingent upon Kellan’s?”
He doesn’t sit down next to me in the chair, not like I want him to, but his stance softens considerably. “I can’t be in two places at once; it makes it easier if you two are in the same location. Kate is being a good Aunt and is siding with me on the issue.” His phone beeps, and after a quick glance, he silences it before setting it, facedown, on a table nearby. But the phone has other ideas, because it buzzes across the wood during three calls in quick succession.
“Maybe you should answer that.”
He shoves his hands in his pockets and sighs. If I’m not mistaken, he looks . . . guilty. Uncomfortable. “I’d rather not.”
I keep my tone light. “Why?”
“Because it’s Callie.”
The phone buzzes again, just about an inch away from the table’s edge. Despite everything that’s gone down over the last year, I try to think about this rationally. Callie Lotus is friends with Kellan. Good friends. They were together for quite a bit of time earlier this year. And thinking about Callie makes me think about Astrid.
“Why hasn’t Astrid come by?”
Jonah’s head tilts enough so his hair falls in his eyes. “We didn’t want to upset you.”
I practically wince against the soft cushions behind me. “Your . . . mother—for all intents and purposes, since that’s what she is to you—hasn’t come to see you or Kellan, who is in a coma, may I remind you, because you’re all worried about upsetting me?”
“To be fair, your mother hasn’t come by, either.”
I try to ignore the ache that comes with this reminder. “Okay, I’ll give you that—but whereas my mom and I prefer to appreciate one another at a distance, you and Astrid are actually close.”
A finger absently drags alongside the side of his nose a few times. “Kate Blackthorn is Astrid’s best friend. They’re like sisters. She’s been kept up-to-date pretty much every second Kellan has been in here.”
Even still . . . “Still!”
“Chloe,” he says, voice low and steady, “you’ve made it . . . clear, if you will, over the last year that you prefer having very little to do with Astrid.”
Oh, this is a nightmare, a terrible, awful, cringe-worthy nightmare. Me? She’s stayed away because of me? I bark out, “She’s your mom!”
“And I see her on a regular basis, as you well know. But we figured, until you are comfortable with her presence in our lives—”
I cut him off right there. “Are you serious?”
He snatches the phone up just before it buzzes off the table and sets it back in the middle. “Look, I think you’re forgetting that I am very in tune with your feelings on the matter. Not the ones you tell me that you think I want to hear, but the ones you truly feel. And I know,” he stresses, hands shoved back into his pockets, “that you are uneasy with my involvement with Astrid, since she’s a link back to Callie. So, to go back to the original question, no—I’m not going to answer Callie’s call. Because it’s been a really crappy week, and I’m sorry, but I don’t want to have to deal with the fall-out that might arise from that scenario.”
My mouth, so unattractively hanging wide open, snaps shut. I feel lousy, so incredibly, selfishly crummy that I can barely stand it. Astrid has been there for him for years, when nobody else was. She took him and Kellan in as her sons, loved them, gave them emotional support and care when none of their family members (save Joey prior to his death) could. And while he claims he still sees and talks to her, it can’t be much, because he and I are together most of our free time. This isn’t okay.
It isn’t okay by a long shot.