He pushed open the heavy storm door and stepped into the warmth of the room. It was dark, lit by candles and the glow from the wood fire stove, and it took his eyes a minute to adjust.
All the mattresses lined up along the wall were occupied by lumps under mounds of blankets. Blake stepped quietly into the room, pulling his hat off his head and stuffing it into his pocket. He was glad they were getting some sleep. The refugees needed it. It felt disingenuous to say, but they were lucky. Besides Richard’s frostbite and a decent-sized blister on Mr. Stacey’s left foot, most of them were just dehydrated, hungry, cold, and exhausted. Once they got some food and water in their system, there wasn’t much for Blake to do except let them rest.
Pushing some hair from his face, he was surprised to see that not everyone was asleep. A girl with blonde curly hair piled on top of her head was sitting cross-legged against the wall, her eyes open but unseeing.
Blake recognized her as the daughter from the day before. He thought her name was Emily. Without all her outer clothes on, and her face clean, she looked younger than he thought she was. Maybe late teens.
Emily was still rail-thin; her borrowed clothes hung from her like listless sails. Blake noted that her feet were bare under her rolled-up sweat pants, and he snagged a blanket from the dwindling pile by the door and took it to her. She didn’t respond, so he opened it up and draped it over her.
She blinked twice, eyes clearing as she focused on Blake’s face. “Oh, hi.”
“You should keep wrapped up,” he told her, trying to keep his voice low.
Emily plucked at the blanket, pulling it up over her shoulders. She turned to look back over at the two lumps closest to the door.
“I’m glad he’s finally sleeping,” she whispered, her chapped lips curling a little.
Blake glanced over to where her parents were sleeping. Her dad had refused last night, pacing up and down the conference room to keep awake. Blake had tried to get him to rest, even to just sit down, but he wouldn’t. Blake couldn’t blame him. After what his family had been through…Blake didn’t think he’d sleep either. And he knew Gabriel wouldn’t.
“Exhaustion won in the end,” Blake answered, taking a seat beside her to watch the room. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
Emily’s hands moved under the blanket. Blake couldn’t see what they were doing, but he suspected she was wringing them. “Nightmares,” she said without looking at Blake.
His throat went dry. He didn’t know what to say. No amount ofyou’re safe nowwould suddenly make her feel that way. He wasn’t stupid. He knew what they looked like—a motel full of predominantly men. Big men. With guns. Of course, she was scared.
Subtly, he shifted away from her, not wanting to crowd her. “I’m sorry.”
She turned to him. Her eyes were big in the gloom, but Blake thought they were brown. “No, I—I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad. It’s not your fault.”
“Please don’t apologize. I don’t blame you. If you want, I can give you guys the keys to the conference room. You can lock it whenever you want.”
Her mouth parted in surprise. “You’d do that?”
“Kind of the bare minimum,” he tried to laugh, but it came out strangled. “Irving probably won’t like it, but he doesn’t like me anyway.”
She smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “Thank you.”
He wanted to tell her that he cared. That her safety, her comfort, mattered to him. Mattered to all of them. But that would be a lot like a wolf telling a sheep, he wanted the pen to keepthemfrom being eaten byotherwolves. How could she trust that? Blake supposed he could tell her he was in a relationship with a man. But that felt performative.
They sat in silence after that, the only sound the crackling of the logs in the stove. He should get up and check on everyone, but he didn’t want to wake them. Not when this might be the first moments of peace they’d felt in weeks. It was too dim to look through his books, not that he really wanted to. The words were beginning to blur, the thin textbook pages wavering in his fingers as he fought the urge to turn them into kindling for the stove.
The notebook full of neat, organized lists of medications he’d been working on mocked him. He was trying to make a quick reference guide. Something he, or one of the others, more likely, could quickly glance at to know which meds were worth grabbing and which weren’t. But that didn’t consider dosage. Or the method of taking the meds—orally, IV, IM—it was endless. And it mattered. In a way that a soldier, ducking aliens, probably wouldn’t remember. They had syringes for now, but how long would they last?
And God, what about expiration dates?
Emily pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her arms on them. “Actually, I um, I wanted to speak to you.”
“Sure?”
“Do you have any insulin?”
Blake stared at her, his jaw slack as he tried to process what she’d just said. Insulin? It was such a common word. He’d probably said it at least once a shift. But that was before. Now it rang in his ears like a gunshot.
His mouth was dry. “Are you diabetic?”
She chewed on her chapped lip, teeth picking at a scab until the skin was pink and raw. “I had a pump, and I was trying to ration it, but I ran out.”
“When?”
