Chapter 26
JANE? JANE. WAKE UP.” A hand frantically shook my shoulder, forcing me out of my slumber. My eyes fought their way open. I blinked a few times in a disoriented daze. Mom’s face hovered over me, the deep creases between her eyebrows pronounced.
“What?” I croaked and glanced around my bedroom, my heart racing from the unexpected awakening.
“It’s Edith, honey,” she said.
“What are you—what?” What on earth was she talking about? Was Edith here at the house for some reason?
“She’s in the hospital.”
I bolted upright. “She’s where?”
Just a few minutes later, Mom and I threw ourselves into the car and took off for Saint Teresa’s Hospital.
Edith had fallen early this morning, broken her hip, and was thankfully discovered by Constance, her neighbor, who had brought her to the hospital.
Her condition was unclear, but a fall at her age was less of a scrape on the knee and more of a serious, even potentially life-threatening, occurrence.
Information flowed quickly through town, and it didn’t take long to reach Mom after she’d called Linda, her old coworker from the hospital and longtime friend, to confirm.
As I dashed unthinkingly across the icy hospital parking lot, without even knowing why, I whispered a silent prayer.
We rushed into the hospital, and a young nurse led us to Edith’s room and let us know that Edith had already been through surgery without complications. The heart monitor, she explained, was a precaution due to Edith’s age.
“It looks like she’s resting right now. You can grab some coffee in the cafeteria while you wait, if you’d like. It’ll probably be a while before she’s awake,” she said.
“No, thank you. I’ll wait here,” I said.
The nurse ducked out. Mom laid a comforting hand on my shoulder when her phone chimed. She dug it out of her bag and sighed. “Oh, I hate to do this.”
“What?”
“I have to go, honey. There’s a plumber coming to the house and then I have to take your dad to his heart checkup in Ponderosa Springs right after that,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it, Mom. Go.”
“Are you sure? You’ll be okay here on your own?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
She turned to leave when she stopped and looked back. “I’ll be able to come back later this afternoon. But text me the moment you know anything, and let Edith know we’re praying for her if she wakes up before I get back.”
“I will.” She departed, and then it was just me and Edith, the sound of her heart monitor serving as the soundtrack. I shuffled closer to her, a delicate woman amid bulky medical equipment.
I took her hand, cold and little, covered in tubes and tape. Clasping my fingers around it, I rubbed for a few moments, warming it up.
“Oh, Edith . . . you can’t leave me now,” I whispered, my voice catching on the ball that sat in my throat.
Heartbreaking images of Edith tumbling down raced through my mind.
I pictured her lying in the dark of the night, alone, confused, scared, hurt.
Trying to crawl to the phone. Yelling out for help.
No one there to answer until Constance found her.
How had she fallen? How long had she waited until Constance arrived?
How had she felt in the moments in between?
A tear escaped, and I dabbed it just as quickly as it had escaped.
I couldn’t risk letting myself fall apart in case she woke up soon.
I pulled a chair up to her bedside and settled, resolving to be right by her side when she did.
The months-old gossip magazines in Edith’s room helped me pass some time before I switched to watching passersby through the window.
Overworked doctors scrawling on clipboards, busy nurses pushing stretchers, and visitors waltzed by in a steady stream.
Every now and then, one of them would come in to check on Edith.
All the while, her heart machine beeped, beeped, beeped.
My phone rang. Alexandria’s name popped up, and my heart leaped into my throat. Excitement for any news about my manuscript mingled with my worry for Edith. With a slow, centering exhale, I picked up.
“Hey, Alexandria.”
“Jane,” she said, the distinct sound of the office’s elevator ding in the background.
“I wanted to touch base with you about your manuscript.” In an instant, my palms were drenched.
I tightened my grip on my phone. Alexandria’s heels clacked on the office floor as she entered her office and shut the door.
“Okay.” I swallowed, closing my eyes. Please, God. Please . . . God . . .
“So . . .” she began just as a knock sounded at her door. “Oh, hold on a second.”
The following moments passed in painful slow motion. Faint voices sounded off for a minute while my heart rate climbed.
“Okay, so, where was I?” she asked.
“You were touching base about my manuscript.” My voice sounded small, pitched a bit too high. I reminded myself to breathe. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. The moment that the last few years of working with Carmichael all added up to. The moment of truth, the beginning of something new.
“Right . . . look, I’ll just cut to the chase. Jim wasn’t interested. I’m really sorry, Jane.”
A wave of nausea hit me. “H-he w—” I choked on my words. They wouldn’t come out. Her words echoed in my mind. Their meaning seeped in with each recurrence. It had taken no more than a few words for my dreams to be demolished. Shattered. Destroyed.
My book wasn’t getting published. The story I’d devoted endless late nights to crafting, poured myself into shaping, spent every precious spare thought and moment on .
. . none of the grand visions I’d had for it would come true.
Jim simply hadn’t been interested in it.
And the chances of getting published somewhere other than Carmichael—the one place where my face was at least a little familiar to the higher-ups and I had someone like Alexandria to push my proposal to the front of the line—were nil.
My vision fractured like a kaleidoscope.
Was this actually happening? Had all that blood, sweat, and tears really built up to . . . this?
“I know this was important to you,” she said.
Important was one word for it. I willed my mouth to move, to say something.
But I couldn’t. I stayed mute. Alexandria continued, “Look, here’s what I’ll say.
Let’s just focus on finishing the task at hand for the moment, Liv’s book.
Jim’s focusing on building up our line of memoirs, which is good news for you.
If you keep on delivering good work, maybe we can try it again in a couple of years. ”
“Yeah. Okay,” I rasped.
“And hey, between you and me, it’s hard to make that much money in fiction if you aren’t a big name. The real money for you is in ghostwriting. You know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
Alexandria wrapped up the call a minute later.
My tears spilled out like torrential rain, my chest heaving up and down.
It was sudden, prompt. One moment I was frozen, sitting perfectly still as it all sank in.
The next moment, the floodgates opened. There was no stopping it—only surrendering to it.
My world was falling apart. First Noah. Then Edith.
And now my book. Nothing was going according to plan.
Worse, the plan was crashing down and taking me with it.
Noah had never seen me as anything but some loser to distract himself with until Alice came back.
Not only did Edith have plans to sell And Then There Were Books, but her health was also in a steep decline.
And the book I’d idiotically imagined sitting on a display table at Fox Books a year and a half from now would never see the light of day.
Would I ever find someone who’d choose me? Would I ever see Edith again after I left this time? Would I ever matter enough to have my name on the book I wrote?
Anger surged through my veins as my thoughts turned to the supposedly caring God who had let this happen. Who’d let Noah stay. Who’d let Edith’s mind and body slip away. Who’d let my dreams crumble.
I brought my legs into my chest and hid my face, granting myself at least a shred of privacy, as hot, ugly tears cascaded down my cheeks. Moments later, I heard footsteps approach and stop at the door.
I lifted my head up, blinking. The nurse I’d expected to see was nowhere to be found.