“You were wrong about Madison too,” Jude says, jerking my attention back. He’s at her side now, his arm stretched to accommodate the tube leading to a bag of fluids. “The next time Hayley woke up, she was crying for Madison. Emily’s got good instincts. She was right.”
“Yeah, you do,” I tell her. I want to tell her I hope her instincts will prompt her to talk to someone, but I don’t. I want to tell her I’ll be there, but I still don’t know how it’s all going to work when we get back home.
Will it ever be the four of us again? Will we even talk? I have a sudden raw aching to stay here with these people who are anything but strangers, but the nurse is back, and that means one of us will go.
The door at the end of the room opens, and two men in blue paramedic shirts enter. A radio on one man’s hip chirps, and I think of the speaker in the woods and bark stinging my hands, and all these memories are a hive of hornets, buzzing and buzzing with no meaning for me at all.
“It’s OK,” Jude says.
His words snag my attention like a hook. I turn my head just a little, just enough to see Jude’s hand rest on Emily’s shoulder. She’s trembling. His eyes meet mine, and there’s zero mistake he knows I’ve heard or that his next words are for me.
“Things are different now,” he says. He never breaks my gaze, but when he nods, I nod back. This isn’t normal friendship. It’s stickier and darker, but I don’t think I’ll wash my hands of it either. It’s harder to wash away things once they’re buried this deep.
“Looks like you’re up, Sera,” the woman says.
I whirl to the paramedics, an argument sputtering on my lips as they mention my elevated temperature and the infection in my hand. They will take me to Marietta too. My dad will meet me there.
Dad.
I can barely hold back tears at the idea. Paramedics help me onto the stretcher and chatter about how long it will take and what their names are… I don’t listen to any of it. I smell the sharp tang of trees and close my eyes tight against an onslaught of memories I’d rather forget.
Chapter 36
It seems like sleep will never come, but it does, and it sticks hard. I doze the entire way home to Marietta, waking when the ambulance doors fling open and drifting off again when I see bright-white rectangles—ceiling lights, I guess—whipping by above me.
I sleep until my dad is there with quiet words and gentle hands, until the cops come with their questions, until Sophie and Liv leave flowers and ask my dad if I’m all right, until I’ve heard all the updates about Lucas being fine and Hayley making it and, of course, that Mr. Walker didn’t. I already knew, but it’s still a sucker punch when they say it again.
I don’t tell my dad how much I saw Mr. Walker endure or that I was the last person who heard him speak. It will come out, but I’m not sure he can handle that now, so I close my eyes like all the news exhausts me. It’s not a lie.
The next time I wake, the room is dim, and there are two people sitting in the chairs across from me. Neither is my dad. One of them has a plastic tub, and there’s a faint smell of cologne in the air.
“Jude?”
My voice scratches, and my vision stretches everything like I’m underwater. I blink until it clears, and then their faces sharpen. An ache swells in my chest, and I don’t know what that means. I barely recognize them, clean like this. I guess I’m clean too now.
I was in the shower so long, Dad knocked on the door to check on me. After I was out and dressed, he helped me comb my hair. He’s never done that before, not even when I was little. But he did today, and I let him. I stared at my freshly scrubbed, still-scratched face in the mirror while he brushed my shoulder-length hair into a gleaming ribbon of black.
He told me I was beautiful.
He did not tell me I look like my mother.
“How are you feeling?” Jude asks.
“Cleaner.”
Jude smiles. He’s back in his element, in an outfit that’s crisp and clean and probably worth more than my bedroom furniture. Aside from dark circles under his eyes, he looks good. Emily looks good too, though there are still scratches on her left cheek.
There are three of us, but there should be four. Six if you count Madison and Hayley, but I don’t, even if I know that’s not fair. I can’t feel their absence, but I can feel the space Lucas would fill. The emptiness of having him down the hall.
“Hey,” Emily says, shifting the basket on her lap.
I scooch up in the bed, reaching for my plastic mug of water. What time is it? My eyes find the digital clock above the TV. Three thirty in the morning.
I sip some water because my throat’s parched. It’s lukewarm through the plastic straw, so I must have slept awhile. I spot a note on my end table. Dad. Home for a nap because the nurses begged him. I begged too. He looked so tired. Still, he insisted on waiting until I fell asleep, and the note promises he’ll be back before I wake up.
“What are you doing here?” I ask the others. “I didn’t know they released you.”
“We weren’t admitted,” Emily says.