I crumpled the card in my hand, crying harder. Even the police officer could see that I had serious issues.
Dante, Claire and Branwell met me at the emergency room entrance. Jack was in surgery. The medical staff had no other information.
I took that as permission to lose it again.
Bless my family. Branwell simply scooped me up and held me while I sobbed, Claire rubbing my back.
“I can’t believe she shot him,” Dante said.
“It was bound to happen with one of her boyfriends, I suppose,” Branwell replied.
I cried harder.
“Wow. That got like . . . no reaction.” Dante whistled. “She’s got it bad.”
“Obviously.” Branwell sighed. “We’ve tried to warn Jack, but he seems just as smitten, poor guy.”
I should have been furious, but their offhand comments simply made me feel worse.
They wereright.
Jackshouldrun. He was too good of a person to deal with my amount of crazy. I was the psycho girlfriend who hadshothim.
At this point, I wasn’t even sure that decades of therapy could fix me.
Branwell rubbed a hand between my shoulder blades. “Again, not even a twitch, Dante. No slap, no grunt. Nothing.”
Dante whistled again. “He’s done a number on her.”
“Eh, I think she was the one who did a number on him.”
I may have kidney punched Branwell at that point.
My brothers wisely switched to discussing why Jack was still corporeal.
“Is it the seriousness of his injury, do you think?” Branwell asked.
“Possible.” Dante shook his head. “Jack just had to be at death’s door in order to stay in our world.”
“If so, maybe we should have let Chiara have at him sooner.”
Branwell grunted over my quickly jabbed elbow.
“I’m just hoping he doesn’t fade away in the middle of surgery or something,” Dante said. “Poor guy could spend eternity half-naked, bloody and in a hospital gown.”
That started me crying all over again. How could I have done this to him?
I kept picturing Jack’s lifeless eyes. I wanted to burn the image from my brain, excise it from memory. But until I knew that Jack would be okay, I couldn’t shake it.
After a ridiculous amount of time in which I cried, paced, cried into Dante’s shoulder, paced, cried onto Branwell’s chest and then paced some more, a doctor finally called our name.
I was in front of him before he finished talking. “H-how is he? P-please. I n-need to know.”
The doctor smiled. “He’s in post-op currently, breathing on his own.”
Relief pounded through me.
“S-so he’s okay?” I may have half-sobbed the words.
