Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Lola
The words won’t leave me alone: No change in his condition.
They’ve been following me all afternoon, sticking to the inside of my skull just like the hospital smell clung to my clothes when I left. The doctor said it like he was talking about the weather. As if he wasn’t standing there holding my entire damn life in his hands.
No change.
It loops in my head the entire drive, stuck on repeat. No change means Dad’s still lying there in that bed. Still not waking up. Still not coming back to me. And he’s caught between here and the afterlife, and I’m supposed to keep breathing while I wait to see which way he falls.
I swallow hard, blinking through the burn behind my eyes, and force myself to focus on the road.
I texted Jace as I was leaving the hospital, my fingers trembling as I typed: On my way.
He replied almost immediately:
Jace: I’ll be waiting out the front.
I slowly turn the corner into Jace’s street. He stands on the curb, backpack hanging off one shoulder—the same beat-up bag he takes to school every day. Its black fabric faded to gray in spots, with a zipper that’s half busted, so it never fully closes.
I’ve watched him struggle with that zipper more times than I care to admit. Seen him force it shut with stubborn, irritated fingers, like he’s refusing to admit it’s beyond fixing.
But it’s the fucking plastic bag in his other hand that makes my chest tighten.
A flimsy grocery store bag, handles stretched thin, filled with whatever he could grab. Everything he owns that matters apparently fits into a plastic bag.
A raw, burning anger churns in my stomach, because I hate that he lives this way.
Hate that no one ever truly cared about him enough to pay attention.
I hate how little the world ever provided for him.
Not the big things, but the small details.
He deserves a real bag, not some junk from a checkout line.
The tires brush the curb as I come to a stop.
The passenger door swings open, and a wave of cold air washes over me, as he slides in beside me.
The backpack drops first, and he arranges it between his feet, adjusting it until it sits upright between his knees. He then places the plastic bag on top of it, gentle until it balances there, before he closes the door.
For a moment, we just sit there, breathing the same air.
He reaches for the seatbelt and pulls it across his chest. The click echoes in the small space before his eyes meet mine. They move over my face. He’s looking for the cracks, for the pain the hospital carved out of me.
“How is he?” he asks, voice low, stripped of its usual shit-talking edge. It’s careful and the tenderness of it sends a splinter of something painful through my chest.
I have to swallow past the lump in my throat.
The words are like acid on my tongue. “No change.”
A muscle tenses in Jace’s jaw. He gives a quick, firm nod, his eyes dropping to the steering wheel for a moment before snapping back to me.
“That doesn’t mean it’s bad,” he says, his voice a low anchor in the swirling chaos of my mind.
It’s not some bullshit platitude. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t offer false hope. He just states a fact—something solid for me to hold onto so I don’t completely fall apart.
“I know,” I whisper, the sound barely there.
I shift the car into drive and pull away from the curb.
The street whizzes by us in a blur of motion. Fancy houses with manicured lawns and perfect shutters blend together.
Beside me, Jace rests his forearms on his thighs, hands loose and open between his knees. Relaxed, but still carrying that quiet awareness he never fully shuts off.
He smells the way he always does. It’s something steady and grounding that settles deep in my chest and makes the noise in my head quiet for the first time all day.
It’s almost like safety, which is a joke within itself because Jace Cooper isn’t safe.
He’s reckless and sharp-edged, all hard angles and brutal honesty.
He’s built to survive things most people never have to face, forged in the kind of shit that breaks others.
But sitting here beside me, quiet and present, he feels steady in a way nothing else does right now. Solid. Unshakable. Like an anchor in the middle of a storm I can’t control. He’s grounding me without even trying, without saying a word, and I have no idea what to do about that.
I keep my eyes on the road, but I am aware of the weight of his stare on my face.
“You don’t have to be okay,” he says finally.
His voice is low and rough but there’s something gentle beneath it. Something that breaks through what I’ve been trying to hold together all day.
Pressure builds behind my eyes. “I know.”
His hand moves then. Slow and hesitant in a way that’s so unlike him it makes my chest hurt.
He reaches across the center console and lightly rests his fingers over mine, where they’re white-knuckling the steering wheel.
His thumb brushes my skin once, a small, stroke—careful and tentative, like the touch given to something you’re afraid might shatter. “I’m here, Bells,” he says softly.
I glance at him, and he’s already looking back at me. His eyes aren’t guarded like they usually are. There’s no cocky smirk, no walls, no distance. It’s just him. Raw and unfiltered.
He lifts my hand from the wheel, and presses it against his chest for a moment. Right over his heart. Letting me sense the consistent pulsing under my hand.
The gesture is brief. It’s over before I can fully process it, but it still unravels threads I didn’t know were holding me together.
He releases my hand immediately, dropping it back to the wheel, his jaw clenched as he looks out the window. As if he’s afraid he just revealed too much to me.
The driveway comes up fast, too fast.
I can’t remember the last few turns. My mind is a blank slate except for the ghost of his heartbeat under my palm. The solid, steady rhythm that, for one damn second, made mine seem less erratic.
I pull in and kill the engine and the car falls silent.
He unclips his seatbelt, the metallic snap breaking the silence. I watch him, my eyes following the lines of his back as he leans down and picks up the bags from between his knees. He lifts them with both hands, cradling the plastic bag on top to prevent anything from spilling out.
He opens the car door and gets out into the cold.
A beat passes before I can move my limbs and follow him out of the car.
He waits for me at the front door, backpack slung over one shoulder, that damn plastic bag dangling from his other hand.
I unlock the door with fumbling fingers and push it open. The hinges creak. I step inside first, the warmth of the house hitting me all at once. Jace follows close behind and closes the door with a soft click.
For a moment, we just stand there in the entryway, caught in the quiet space between the outside world and whatever the hell this is.
He pauses in front of me, his body blocking the rest of the house. He’s close enough that I can sense the heat radiating off him.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Bells?” he asks.
I nod automatically. It’s easier than admitting the truth. Easier than saying I feel seconds away from falling completely apart that I can’t let him see.
He watches me for a moment longer than necessary. His eyes move over my face slowly, noting every crack, every tremor I’m trying hard to conceal. He knows it’s bullshit. That I’m lying straight to his face. He just doesn’t call me on it anymore.
He used to push, smirk, or make some stupid joke about how I overthink everything, how I can’t let shit go. Now he just… sees.
And somehow, that’s worse.
“Okay,” he says softly. The word is a surrender, an acceptance of my bullshit.
He turns and walks down the hallway toward the spare room, the plastic bag rustling faintly with each step.
I stand there, frozen, until the doorway at the end of the hall swallows him.
The silence he leaves behind settles like a weight on my chest. It presses down, making it hard to breathe. I need to move.
I force myself into the kitchen because standing in the entryway and staring into the silence is going to make me break apart.
I lean against the counter, my palms flat on the cold granite, and look at the chair across from me.
The one Dad usually sits in. The one that’s so empty it’s like a hole punched through the room.
No change in his condition.
The words detonate in my head without warning. A bomb in the quiet. They ricochet around my skull, bouncing off every raw nerve until I can’t breathe past them.
I blink hard, pulling away from the counter with a jerky motion, struggling against the tide that threatens to pull me under. I need to do something, anything, before I drown in it.
The sound of Jace’s footsteps on the tiled floor pulls me back from the edge.
My body moves on autopilot. I yank open the fridge, the bright light an assault on my eyes, and grab two cans of Coke. The cold bites into my skin, a welcome shock of something real.
I set them down on the table with a sharp clank, right beside the stack of books I left there this morning. English. The boring kind that Miss Mallory thinks is supposed to shape Jace’s future. A future that feels a million miles away right now.
Even though this is the absolute last thing I want to do right now, is to sit here and talk about symbolism and metaphors and whatever else she assigned, I have to do something.
He enters the kitchen and stops suddenly when he notices the table is set. His eyes flick from the books to the two Coke cans, then to me. A muscle in his jaw ticks.
“You’re serious,” he says, voice flat with disbelief.
“Shocking, I know,” I reply, forcing the words past the lump of concrete in my throat. I make my mouth curve into what’s supposed to be a smile but probably looks more like a grimace.
He exhales through his nose. “You just got back from the hospital.”