He gaped. “You’ve been asking me to come for years.”
“I would have lapsed into a diabetic coma years ago if I’d known that’s what it was going to take to get my asshole brother to finally come home.”
He could have argued this wasn’t technically his home, that none of them lived in their hometown anymore, but there were more important issues. “A diabetic coma? You’re diabetic?”
She was still glaring at him, and she crossed her arms over her chest. “How would you know?”
“She didn’t know either,” Lilah said, flopping into the green vinyl chair next to the bed. She stared Lacey down until her sister glanced away. “And it wasn’t a coma, it was just shock.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t know?” Linc came around the other side of the bed.
Lacey sighed heavily. She looked older too, now that he was closer. But where Lilah had grown up, Lacey had aged. Her hair and her eyes were the same, but the lines around her mouth hadn’t been there before. And she was too thin, when she’d always been a long rope of bones and muscle.
He went to brush a stray hair from her face, and she jerked her head back. “You didn’t have to come.”
Linc swallowed. His hand slid into his pocket, feeling for his phone. Avery still hadn’t replied to his text. There would be so much make-up sex when he got back to Seacroft. But if he turned tail to check his messages again, Lacey would pounce on the advantage and probably never forgive him. “Lace. What happened?”
“It’s not a big deal,” she huffed.
“It is a big deal.” Lilah half shouted from her chair. “You work too hard. You need to take better care of yourself.”
“But I have to take care of you.”
The room echoed with the silence as Linc’s sisters stared each other down. He was trapped between them. Were their whole lives like this?
“What did the doctors say?” he said, trying to break the tension.
“Lincoln?”
Linc wasn’t afraid of many things. He had literally been trained to run into burning buildings when all common sense would say to stay the hell away. But no amount of training could wipe away the fear that gripped his chest and squeezed so hard his heart felt like it might burst.
Slowly, he turned toward the man in the doorway.
If Lilah had grown up and Lacey had aged, then Linc’s father had...
Disintegrated? Collapsed?
He was shorter than Linc remembered. Thinner too. His hair was mostly gone and what managed to stay stuck to his scalp was a wispy yellowy gray. His skin, speckled with patchy, white stubble, hung from his face like it was too big for the bones beneath.
Linc’s voice was a hoarse rasp. “Dad.”
Gerry Scott held a cardboard tray with three coffee cups and a paper bag. As he shuffled into the room, Linc couldn’t ignore the limp and the way his left foot turned in at an ugly angle. “I brought coffee and donuts.”
Lilah growled. “For God’s sake, Dad, she can’t have a donut. She’s diabetic.”
Linc held his breath. The last time they’d been together in one place, words from any of them, in that tone, would have started a fight. The mean hiss of air through his father’s teeth would tell them trouble was imminent.
Instead, though, the man before him flinched back, setting the bag down at the foot of the bed in a hurry. “No, I know that. I got a muffin too.”
“That’s not any better. She can’t have muffins. They’re full of sugar.”
“Would you please stop talking about me like it’s my ears and not my pancreas that stopped working? I can hear you fine,” Lacey glared at her sister.
“But you can’t eat that.”
Their voices rose and filled the room. The whole time, Linc’s dad kept his eyes and head down, as if he wanted to be anywhere else. The sight of him was almost sickening, like he was rotting from the inside out, and Linc could only stare.
Finally, a nurse came in to see what the commotion was. Her eyes widened when they landed on Linc. “Oh. You’re new.”
