“I thought you were on a plane,” he said.
“I was.”
“You jumped out?”
“No.” I smiled weakly. “But I would have, if we hadn’t still been on the ground.”
“Well, then, lucky me,” he said, wincing with every syllable.
I leaned in, my lips against his ears. “I’m so sorry. I’m going to fix this. I’m going to fix you.”
Then, to the others, I said, “We need to get him to the hospital.”
“You don’t think we’ve suggested that, Florence Goddamn Nightingale?” April mocked. “He refuses.”
“Refuses?” I was dumbfounded. Who refused medical care in a situation like this? “Why?”
“I can’t afford it.”
I stared at him. Given the state of his injuries, that didn’t feel like an option. “Then we take you to an urgent care. Or a doctor.”
“Can’t afford that either. I don’t have insurance. Just get me some duct tape. I’ll be fine.”
Scott was going to bleed out… for financial reasons? No. Not on my watch. I dug into my purse for my credit card.
“My father did this,” I said, holding up his credit card. “Now he can damn well pay for the repair!”
The ER wasa blur of bright lights, forms signed on my father’s card, and Scott’s stubborn refusal to complain until the pain meds finally won. By the time we got him home, the apartment was silent except for the faint hum of the fridge and Scott’s uneven breathing from the mattress on the floor. Doped up on pain meds, he was half-buried beneath a pile of mismatched blankets, his bare chest rising and falling in slow, shallow breaths.
My father, unknowingly, had spared no expense with the hospital tests, and the results were better than we’d feared. Scott had taken enough blunt-force trauma to crack three ribs and lacerate his spleen, but the CT scan showed no active bleeding. No surgery required, or overnight admission.
A square of gauze peeked out from under the tight elastic bandage wrapped around his fractured ribs. The deep contusions along his side and back would bruise spectacularly before they faded. His other injuries rounded out the damage—a mild concussion, a stitched split lip and eyebrow, a sprained wrist now in a brace, one eye swollen completely shut, and a jaw so bruised and swollen he could barely get words out. As bad as that all was, it could have been so much worse.
April stood in the doorway, stone-faced, her arms folded in front of her. We’d spoken only in short, clipped bursts since I arrived and took over. Our eyes met now, hers filling with tears.Mine followed suit. When I stepped toward her, she turned away and slipped out the door. I hurried down the stairs after her, catching her by the shoulder and pulling her into a hug.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t know.”
She cried into my shoulder for a moment before she stiffened and pulled back. “If his spleen had ruptured before we found him, he would’ve died.”
“Thank god that didn’t happen.”
“But itcouldhave,” she said, voice breaking. “Do you get that, Michelle? Do you understand the stakes? Just go. Book a new flight and go back to where you came from. Before Mitchell grows up without a father because of you.”
April pushed past me and out the door. I stood there, gutted. Was she right? Was holding on to Scott selfish?
I walked back upstairs and checked on him. He was sleeping soundly, thanks to the pain medication, so I turned my attention to the disaster his apartment had become. What little furniture he owned had been upended or broken. Even the mattress he was now lying on had been flipped up against the wall. Scott’s whole life tossed like trash. The violence that had happened here was a cold reminder of who my father was—and who my mother was, behind him. And I knew that if I booked a new flight like April wanted, one day I’d be just as cruel as they were. Escaping them wasn’t just about love anymore. It was about survival. About the person I wanted to become.
Filling a bucket with sudsy water, I got down on my knees and scrubbed blood from the floorboards, the baseboards, even the walls that the fight had never touched. I couldn’t stop. I needed to erase every trace of what my father had done.
Then I reached the hole in the wall, the one Scott’s half-tamed opossum used whenever he was feeling a little wild. A trail of blood led straight through it, tiny smudges on thecracked plaster leaving no doubt. Zonk had been caught in the crossfire.
I leaned closer, my heart thudding, and spotted more red deeper inside the tunnel. That was the final blow. My father hadn’t just gone after Scott’s body, he’d gone after his home, his safety, and even the creepy little creature he cared for. There was nothing he hadn’t touched. Nothing he hadn’t destroyed. And I either owned up to what my family had done, or I slunk away and became them.
With Scott still resting, I reached for the bedside garage bin to empty it, when something inside caught the light. Two torn scraps of paper lay folded over each other, one corner stained dark red. I pulled them out carefully, smoothed them open—and froze.
Together, they made my father’s signature.
It was the check my sister had mentioned, the one Scott had supposedly taken over me, fifteen thousand dollars meant to erase him from my life. Except this one was smeared with Scott’s blood. And it had been torn in two.
