Chapter 37
GIANNA
The doctors and nurses working on Chiara are moving faster and faster. They’ve cut off her dress, it’s hanging off the sides of the bed she’s on like forgotten, discarded curtains and all the beeping and yelling is so loud I can’t hear the prayer running on repeat in my head.
I’m about to pass out. I can’t face this. I’m watching my sister bleed, and I can’t bear to see her die.
Those are the thoughts I can hear just fine. No matter how much I don’t want to.
I feel him next to me even before he slides his hand into mine. I try to jerk my hand away, but he only squeezes it tighter.
“You shouldn’t go through this alone,” he whispers in my ear.
It’s not right that just his touch and the sound of his voice should make me feel so much better. Not when my sister might be dying. Not when my dad could already be dead. Not when he caused it all. But it does.
“Wouldn’t you rather cut your losses and run away like my sister’s husband did?”
The word husband came out of my mouth like the worst kind of curse word.
“I don’t see a point in getting anything else if I lose you in the process.”
I turn to glare at him. Why is he saying these nice things? Just because I want to hear them? Just to make me feel better? Why does he have to sound so sincere?
Another doctor just rushed into the room where Chiara is still bleeding, this one wearing a surgeon’s outfit.
Now a nurse is holding the door open and they’re wheeling my sister out, a doctor straddling her, giving her chest compressions.
They’re running. Matteo lets go of my hand so I can take off after them. He’s right behind me.
“What’s happening? What’s going on?”
They all ignore me as they wheel my sister into an elevator. The same male nurse who took me to sit down stops me as I try to get in behind her.
“They’re taking her up to surgery, it’s on the third floor.”
I just gape at him. Unable to ask any of the questions rattling inside my mind and choking me.
“What are her chances?” Matteo asks the question I need the answer to, but can’t bear to ask. Or hear it.
“We have the best surgeons here,” the nurse tells him. “Her chances are good. You should go up and wait there.”
The elevator returns empty, and he holds the door for us, pressing the button for the third floor before stepping back and giving me a small smile.
Then I’m alone with Matteo in the elevator, shaking like a dried-up leaf in the wind that’s about to fall. That’s what I feel like. That I’m about to fall and I’ll never get up again. That I’ll just rot away on the ground. Forgotten.
Until he slips his arm around my shoulders and holds me tight.
“You can’t give in to despair,” he says. “Nothing’s over yet.”
Yet… yet… yet…
The word reverberates in my mind like the sound of a gong. Or the church bell. The sad kind they ring for funerals.
He leads me from the elevator and towards a sitting area that’s nearly empty. Light green hallways lead from this room in many directions. I have no idea where my sister is. I don’t feel her anywhere and it’s making me shake even harder.
“Sit,” he says and eases me down onto one of the chairs. “I’ll go find out what I can.”
I watch him search for a nurse, find one, have a conversation then come back to me. The picture is all fuzzy, like in a dream, where I know everything that’s going on and yet don’t, like I’m not a part of it at all.
“A doctor will come to us with news when they have it.”
I should be pushing him away, telling him to leave, telling the nurses to call the cops because I’m his prisoner. Instead, I lean against his shoulder and let him wrap his arm around me again.
Because I am his prisoner. And not in the sense that cops can help with. I need him here with me. Because he’s right, I can’t face this alone. I can’t face this without him.