“There’s not much time left, bub.” Nothing feels real, even my words are too flat. “Can I carry you out to see your mom?”
He comes to me too easily and I want to weep at the feel of him in my arms. The bones that wrap around my neck that barely hold himself up. The lack of weight that sits across my forearms as I stand, pausing in the short hallway.
“She’s not well, Em. Are you sure?”
He sniffles, but then he nods.
Returning to my side of the gurney, I lay Emmett next to his mother, and he immediately curls up around her body without a second glance at the wires and tubes connecting her to the machines next to them.
He just … tucks into her. Closes his eyes.
And it’s like the years melt away from him, the events that lead us here slipping away as the tension he keeps in his shoulders lessen.
Just a boy and his mother.
It’s so damn innocent and bitter tasting on my tongue.
So futile and fleeting, this moment of peace.
Even Bobbie steps back, swiping viciously at her face.
Part of me wants to believe that life has its reason for putting us through the things we have. But as I watch Emmett’s chest fall into an even rhythm, his face smoothing with sleep, that piece of me dies.
It could have always been like this.
He didn’t have to go through that shit.
Fuck Charline for letting him. For not protecting him.
For not letting it just be the two of them.
“He would have killed us both.”
It’s so quiet, weak, I barely hear it.
“It w-w-was … only way.” A red-hot rage floods my bloodstream at the cracking sound of her whispers. “T-t-t-to keep-p-p him …alive.”
My fists clench and unclench at the way her weak fingers barely lift to feather over Emmett’s back, the place I’m not allowed to touch—the place there’sscars her husband put there—and my stomach rolls violently.
“I’m pretty sure death would have been fuckingbetter.”
One Month Later
Chapter 67
Emmett
The sound of aconstant beep has pulled me from sleep yet again.
Except this time, it’s an alarm instead of a monitor flatlining.
There’s no corpse next to me, even though I still feel like it is.
Not even a body is squeezed in with me as the sound is silenced from the other room, footsteps I can’t help but zone in on shuffling around the house. It’s like a fucked-up superpower at this point, hearing everything in the house. Assessing it before it hits my room. Wondering if this time I guessed wrong, and it’ll be the face of my nightmares that floats through that door instead of Tristen. Or Hatley.
Sometimes it’s Bobbie, but I hate seeing her just as much.
None of them could save her.
