Will dropped his head into his hands. He could still hear the chaos of that little girl’s hospital room echoing in his head, and he cursed the fact that it made his pulse race. The sound of his blood rushing in his ears grated on him. He was no more alive than Tabitha “Tabby” McGrady. Why couldn’t he just accept that?
Reaching for the bottle again, he drowned everything out in the burn of cheap alcohol. Until even that faded away into numbness.
Then he slept.
Seventeen
The next morning, Will found Emmy in the kitchen fixing breakfast. The sun shone through the windows, illuminating her beautiful face, causing her hair to shine. He heard birds chirping. Puffy white clouds floated in a sky of crystalline blue. Flowers waved cheerily in the breeze. God fucking damn it, he hated that he was walking into a scene from a Disney movie when his head was pounding and grief was still a gaping wound inside his chest.
“Hey,” Emmy said quietly, her expression wary.
“Hey,” Will grunted. Then he cleared his throat and tried again. “Hi. Good morning. Sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Here, have some coffee and painkillers.”
“You’re an angel,” he murmured, taking the mug and the two pills from her. He burned the roof of his mouth as he swallowed the pills, but he didn’t care. “Seriously, Em, you’re a rock. I shouldn’t have gone at you like that yesterday.”
“I assumed you had your reasons. All is forgiven as long as you don’t make a habit of it.” She sat down at the tablewith her own coffee and a couple slices of buttered toast. “Did something happen yesterday? Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Just a crap day at work. I let it get to me.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
She was still studying him, like she knew there was plenty more that he wasn’t telling her, but she didn’t press. For that, he was extremely grateful. He sat and sipped his coffee, willing the pain to recede just a bit so he could think of what he needed to do next.
“At least you don’t have too many bad days left, right?” Emmy offered into the silence.
His head snapped up. “Why?”
“Because… your two weeks’ notice is basically up, isn’t it?”
Of course that’s what she meant. Jesus, he needed to pull it together. She wasn’t threatening him with a shortened existence. For a second, he thought she was going to say she’d found a way out of the book and was leaving him behind. But that was a stupid thought. She would have been way more excited if she’d found her escape route.
“Right, yeah. Friday’s my last day. As long as nothing too catastrophic happens in the next couple days, I should be fine.”
His phone rang, shrill and insistent. Will winced and picked it up, mainly to stop the sound from driving an ice pick through his skull.
“Hello?”
“Hello, stranger!”
“Oh. Hey, Mom.”
Emmy watched his face change as he listened to whatever it was his mother had to say. Then he got up from the tableand wandered away, talking quietly. She wanted to jump up, grab the alcohol off the top of the fridge, and dump it all down the drain while he was distracted. But that wasn’t the right way to go about helping her new friend. She’d never had to confront addiction before—in herself or in others—but her gut knew he would only resent her for interfering like that. It might push him to drink more just to prove she couldn’t control him. She sat and ate her toast as she contemplated what might have happened to push Will over the edge. Maybe Jared would know. Would it be treacherous to go behind Will’s back and ask his best friend what was up? Probably.
“Uh, yeah… okay. Yeah, that works,” Will said, returning to the table. “No, I swear, I’m fine. I just woke up, that’s all. Yeah, love you, too. Bye.”
He hung up and then just stared at his phone as if he didn’t remember what he was supposed to do with it now. After a few seconds, he looked up at Emmy and smiled wryly.
“That was my mom.”
“Yeah, I heard. Everything okay?”
“She and my dad want to have dinner on Saturday. Here. She would like the dinner to be here.”
Emmy slowly put down her coffee mug as she took in this new development. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
