She doesn’t soften the answer.
“He took a very hard hit,” she says.“The bone is fractured, and the surrounding muscle tissue is torn. We won’t know yet how much strength he’ll recover.”
My stomach drops.
“Is he awake?” Leo asks quickly.
“He’s very sleepy,” she replies.“But he keeps asking for his girlfriend.”
The hallway goes completely silent.
“Which one of you is his girlfriend?” she asks.
For a moment, I can’t move. Can’t breathe. Can’t think. I look around the room and feel eyes burning my skin. Then I step forward.
“It’s me,” I say quietly.
The doctor nods once.
“Follow me.”
And before I can look back at anyone else, I follow her down the hallway toward Blake.
Chapter 21
Blake
The first thing I become aware of is the weight of my own body pressing strangely against the hospital mattress beneath me. It’s not the sharpness of pain or the brightness of the lights overhead or even the quiet mechanical rhythm of the monitors somewhere near my bed. It’s the unsettling sensation that my shoulder no longer belongs to the same map of movement my brain has trusted for most of my life. As if something fundamental shifted while I wasn’t looking, and hasn’t yet decided whether it intends to shift back.
Then the pain arrives.
Not suddenly, not violently, but slowly and deliberately. It spreads outward from my shoulder in deep, pulsing waves that feel heavier than ordinary injury pain ever does. It’s the kind of ache that carries consequences with it, the kind that makes you understand immediately that something important has changed, whether you are ready to admit that yet or not.
I don’t open my eyes right away. I don’t need to. The smell alone tells me where I am.
Antiseptic. Clean sheets. Artificial air. Hospital. Surgery. Recovery.
And somewhere underneath all of it, the memory of Perth’s shoulder driving into mine with far too much precision to be accidental still lingers like unfinished business I haven’t figured out how to respond to yet.
The second thing I notice is her hand.
It’s warm and steady and wrapped around mine like she has been sitting there long enough to forget how long she has been sitting there. Her fingers rest carefully against my palm as though she is afraid that letting go might somehow change the outcome of something neither of us can control right now.
That’s when I open my eyes.
Lisa is sitting beside my bed, her mascara smudged under her eyes in a way that tells me she stopped thinking about appearances hours ago. Her shoulders are slightly hunched forward as if she has been holding herself together by force alone while waiting for me to wake up.
“Hey,” I manage, my voice coming out rougher than I expected, like my throat forgot how to work while I was under anesthesia.
Her entire face shifts immediately. Relief first. Then worry. Then something softer than both of those things layered underneath them.
“Are you ok?” she asks, and the way she says it makes it sound like she has been asking herself that same question over and over again while sitting here waiting.
“I am now,” I tell her honestly. Because the moment I see her sitting there beside me, everything else about this room feels less important than it did a minute ago.
Holding her hand feels different tonight. Not unfamiliar. Not new.
Just heavier with meaning than it used to feel, like something quietly settled into place between us sometime during the game without either of us noticing exactly when it happened.
