“Is he okay? I need to see him.” I look to my uncle, then notice the sheriff sitting behind him. “Wade! Cade did this. You have to find him!” My pitch rises as the terror of that moment floods into me.
All he does is squint while Uncle Dixon takes my hand.
My stomach sinks. He isn’t the empathetic type.
“Oliver’s in surgery, Soph. He’s—” His square jaw clenches. “—lost a lot of blood.”
Yea, I know.
It was all over me.
“Is he going to live?” I don’t even want to ask.
He takes a long inhale. “I don’t know,” he mutters. “He’s strong and healthy. He’ll—”
The walls close in on me.
I can’t breathe as the devastation rips through me. Cupping my baby belly, all I can do is hope, for our sake he survives.
My wedding ring catches a reflection from the dim light of the curtained window, it still has specks of red.
Is this all I’ll have left of him?
I don't fucking care
Sophia
All of the otherhospital sounds disappear into the background. The nurses talking, carts rumbling through the halls, none of it makes it into my focus.
I just sit on the most uncomfortable chair ever invented with his hand in mine while I press my forehead to his knuckles.
The tape on the bandage of my leg where they pulled out a huge piece of metal pinches when I move, so I’m a statue, listening to the comfort of the electronic beep of his heart and the rhythmic hiss of the ventilator breathing for him.
There’s barely any part of him that isn’t swaddled in some sort of gauze.
But he’salive.
I just need him to stay that way.
A light touch on my shoulder startles me.
“Mrs. Brookes?” The nurse’s brows are knotted. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“I wasn’t asleep,” I say hoarsely.
“Oh.” She steps back. “I said your name a couple of times and—”
“I guess I’m not used to it yet. We just got married when this…” I drop my head back to his knuckles, too tired and overwhelmed to want to talk.
I just want to crawl up there with him, hold him, remind myself he’s still here.
“That’s…awful.” She takes a deep breath. “But you have a visitor. He said he’s your dad.”
“Okay. Can you send him in?” I don’t want to move.
“We only allow one person in the ICU at a time.” Her voice carries the robotic drone of having repeated that phrase a thousand times.
Fucking shit.
