I ignore her, adjusting myself enough to make room. A little pain from a stab wound won’t stop me right now.
Pulling her hand that’s still in mine, I lead her up onto the hospital bed with me.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she whispers.
“It hurts to not hold you. Just give me this, Will. Please, let me hold you,” I beg. She’s on my good side anyway, so it’s not like she’ll hurt my wound. And my forearm is wrapped up in a cushioned bandage.
She leans into my side, gripping the hospital gown as she cries.
“I thought I lost you. When I—” She gasps. “When I walked into the cabin, I just saw you on the ground and I thought you were gone. And then Lennox… Fuck.”
I can barely make out her words, but I understand her fear more than anything. I rub her shoulder, and she lets out all of her emotion. I have a strong suspicion she was—or still is—in shock and everything is hitting her all at once.
I don’t know how long she cries for, but eventually her tears dry up. She lifts her head up to look at me and wipes away tears I didn’t even realize were still falling.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Anything,” I tell her.
“Did I kill him?” She whispers it like she’s scared of my answer. I know somewhere deep in her brain, she knows logically that she didn’t, but wading through her shock proves to be impossible.
“No, Will, you didn’t. That was a not-so-unfortunate reaction to him falling. That is one hundred percent not on you.”
She nods, but I know she doesn’t fully hear me yet.
A nurse comes in, concern in her eyes as she looks at Willow.
“The doctor asked me to come in and check on you,” she says softly, her eyes on Willow, not me.
My eyes tear up again with the fact that she’s in so much shock the doctors want to intervene.
“I’m good. Totally good.” Willow’s voice cracks as she continues attempts to sit up.
“I tell you what, if you come with me for maybe half an hour max, we’ll check you out and see if we can get you feeling a little bit better. After that, you are welcome to come back. We’ll set up a recliner for you to sleep in if you’d like, too.”
Willow’s gaze shifts from the nurses to mine. I give her a small nod.
“O-Okay.” She slowly gets off my bed with help from the nurse before she leads her out of my room.
The nurse meets my eyes over Willow’s head, nodding in a subtle way to let me know she’ll probably be a lot longer than thirty minutes.
I lean back on the bed, wiping my face one more time. I’ve seen a lot in my life, but seeing Willow like that is by far the worst. There’s nothing I can do to help either. This feeling of helplessness isn’t unknown to me, but this feeling of wanting to escape it is new.
A knock at the door makes me lift my head as Woodcroft walks in.
I refuse to hide my glare. Their response was abysmal, and I don’t know that anything he says will make me forgive that.
“I’m sorry, Oak,” he says quietly.
“What the fuck happened?” I growl.
He sighs as he sits in the chair Willow vacated not all that long ago.
“He sent us on a wild goose chase,” he says plainly.
I stare at him, waiting for a better explanation because that tells me nothing.
He lets out a sigh. “He called in an anonymous tip to the line, saying Tennison was on the opposite end of town in some abandoned barn. We followed through because, well, we had to. That’s the job. When Arlo called us, we immediately knew what had happened, but it put us just far enough away for shit to go down with no backup.”
