Everyone around me talks. A hand grips my shoulder. Everything blurs. The room tilts. I try to focus, to listen. I try so damn hard. Madison was… I was… There and then gone.
“Five days… maybe more.”
“No… no, no, no…” I whisper.
Claire’s quiet sob reaches me. My knees hit the floor.
And the darkness swallows me whole.
26
GO HOME
HUNTER
“Sweetheart, you need to go home. Go home, shower, eat something. Come back tomorrow fresh. You can’t be in here stinking the place up.”
Claire’s voice echoes through my head. I hear her, but it doesn’t reach me, not really. I lift my head, finding her across the bed, on Madison’s other side. She’s still in her pink scrubs. Her normally neat and perfect hair is frizzy and dishevelled. Her eyes are red, ringed with dark shadows from the hours of worry I put there. She looks how I feel—drained, cracking at the seams.
My hand curls around Madison’s. It’s warm but slack, her fingers lifeless. A faint IV bruise blooms across her wrist, and her pulse flutters against my thumb—there, but too faint, too far away. A sharp pain hits me in the chest.
Claire rests her hand over Madison’s other one. It’s wrapped in layers of white bandage, protecting every scrape, every bruise from the creek’s rocks she never should have hit. Her eyes shift past my shoulder, then toward the door. Footsteps shuffle behind me, and a hand drops onto myshoulder, squeezing once, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything.
“Hunter,” she says, sharper this time. “Go home. Shower. Come back tomorrow.”
“Maybe you should go home first, and I’ll stay,” I choke out.
“I will do no such thing. I am her mother, and this is my hospital. I won’t tell you again. Go home. Come back tomorrow with a clear head, and I’ll explain everything again.”
“What if she wakes when I’m gone?”
My throat burns.Fuck.I can’t be gone when she wakes up. I have to be here. I need to tell her I’m sorry. That I should have been quicker. That I shouldn’t have asked her to jump with me. We shouldn’t have gone up the trail at all. If I hadn’t pulled her off the main path, if I hadn’t been so desperate to be alone with her, none of this would have happened.
Yeah, but then when would she have told you how she really feels?
“She won’t. Not tonight.” Claire’s voice softens. “I need the night with my daughter. Please go home.”
“Claire…”
My head drops. The love of my goddamn life is fighting for hers, and I’m being told to walk away.
“I know.”
She comes around the bed, takes my shoulders, steadying me like she’s done it a thousand times. Her hands slide to my cheeks, her gaze locking onto mine.
“Listen to me. This was a freak accident. Don’t you dare blame yourself. You guys have walked that trail a million times. You’ve jumped from that lookout more summers than I can count. I know how much you love her. I know.”
The fight drains out of me, my body sagging.
“Hunter, I need you to look after yourself because when?—”
“If.” The word slips out of me.
“No.Whenshe wakes up, I’m going to need your help. She’s going to need you.”
The door clicks open. I look up to see Asher slipping inside, moving quietly. His eyes land on Madison, and they glass over. He bends to press a kiss to Claire’s forehead, then moves to my side.
“I’ve got him, Momma Claire,” he murmurs.
