“Her kidneys are too weak to withstand the antibiotics. She’s not stable enough for surgery.”
I cross my arms over my middle and hold myself tightly. “How?”
Something in my aunts face cracks open. “Her appendix burst, and she rejected the treatment. It was already too late when she got here.”
The shake of my head does nothing but displace the tears clinging to my lashes.
I want Tristen.
The thought just adds more to the collection on my face.
He’s not coming back.
I don’t deserve to have him back. Not that I ever really had him in the first place.
“Emmett. The insurance isn’t going to cover anything past what I can do for her here.” There’s a hitch to my aunt’s words. A thickness. “And I don’t have everything she needs.”
She buries her face in her hands; the burden of the truth she’s not saying out loud dangling thickly in the air between us.
But I already know. My mother is going to die.
“The infection is spreading, and I can’t stop it.”
I nod as I stare unseeing at the linoleum floor beside her, my throat too raw for words, my chest too tight for anything but short puffs.
I should feel … something, right? Something for the woman that brought me into this world?
Instead, I feel … nothing.
Not like I expected when Tristen showed up to bring me here. When he opened his mouth and said the words.
I knew one day, this would come.
And now that I see it … I can’t help that maybe I’m …relieved.
“Where’s Tristen?”
My aunt gnaws at her lip and sniffles as she stands, the clear regret radiating from her in waves.
“They’d—uh—just dropped off a patient before bringing you here. So, um—” the scrub of her face is audible, her steps uneven across the room, “—probably back out on the road.”
“What does he do out there?”
The surprised look she flings over the bed, my mother’s body breathing via machines between us, is all furrowed brows and bloodshot eyes. “He’s an EMT, sweetheart. Him and Hatley patch people up enough to get them here.”
“Oh.”
With a bouncing knee and a restlessness gathering in my veins, I grip the fabric covering my fists tighter.
Should I have known that?
“He didn’t tell you that?”
He just showed up one day and took me with him.
“I never thought to ask. He just smells like smoke sometimes when he comes home.”Home. My stomach twists up. “Do you think he’ll come back?”
It’s quiet off my lips, the words melding into the subtle beep of the monitor and the nearly silent crinkle of the packaging my aunt breaks open to administer meds for my mom.
