Seven Years Ago
SULLY
“Sul, can I call you back later? I’m about to head into a lecture—”
“Yeah, yeah.” I could barely catch a breath enough to talk, but the hospital loomed in front of me, and fuck, fuck, fuck, I needed to know what I was walking into. “Can you just quickly tell me, like, what it means if someone has a—a pulmonary…embolism? I think that’s—yeah. A pulmonary embolism.”
“I—” Blake’s voice cut off, sounding as though he’d stopped in his tracks.
“Why are you asking? A pulmonary embolism is a potentially life-threatening condition. About one in three people—” He stopped short, and a buzzing filled my head; my vision blurred.
Life-threatening, life-threatening, life-threatening. “Sully, is something—”
“Ellie,” I choked out, and Blake went silent. He was so silent that I wanted to scream. “But I talked to her. She was…talking, breathing. She was—”
I’d never wanted to finish a sentence with the word “okay” more in my life.
“Talking and breathing are good signs.” My brother’s voice had morphed, become a different version of itself. Quieter, more careful. Less like a regurgitation of a textbook. “Was she in a lot of pain?”
“I don’t—I don’t know. She didn’t say anything about pain. She wasn’t in pain this morning. I’m almost there, at the hospital.”
“You need to breathe, too, Sul.”
I tried to, but air felt useless unless Ellie also had it. And I needed to see her, make sure she was still breathing.
“What were you saying?” The words slipped out, my anxieties talking for me. “About one in three people?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t saying anything.”
“Blake.”
“Sully. I wasn’t saying anything. Ellie’s going to be okay.”
I nodded, latching onto those words, even if he was just saying them to say them. I didn’t care. They were what I needed, why I called—to hear my med school brother tell me she was going to be okay.
“She has to be okay, Blake.”
“She will be.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
And because Blake always seemed to know things, and I might not survive if it wasn’t true, I let myself believe it.