Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Noa
I finish the bottle with Carly, and because we finished the bottle, take her up to my hotel room to share a bed and sleep it off together.
I’m deep in dreamland, where scenes and people don’t exactly make sense when a buzzing wakes me.
Rolling, I pick up my phone and squint through the dark. I rise onto my side when I see the string of notifications.
8 missed calls.
3 voicemails.
1 text.
Frowning, I come into a sit, my eyes adjusting to the brightness of the screen as I tap on the text message first.
Stone: It’s Ma.
I race through the hospital doors, familiar enough with the layout that I reach the oncology floor in minutes.
The elevators open directly into the waiting room where I find Stone pacing, hands on his head.
“Stone!” I rush up to him.
Fear and love pour into my body, urging me to put my hands on his waist and pull him close. Tensed muscle and the soft fabric of his shirt brushes against my palms. I dig my fingers in, and it’s like trying to carve into a rock.
“It was so fast.” Stone’s voice is hoarse. He won’t look at me. I stare up at the underside of his chin, covered with day-old scruff and strange cuts I don’t remember seeing on him before.
“What happened?”
“She fell walking to the bathroom.”
“I meant your face.”
“Oh.” If it’s possible, his expression shutters further. “I had to sort something out.”
“And that something was…?”
“Not important.”
He lifts his hands to his face, his knuckles scraped and clotted with blood.
My stomach plummets. “Stone, what did you do?”
“Ma fell. It’s bad.”
“Berta’s supposed to help her when she needs help at night.” My brows draw together as I realign my concerns. Stone’s battle wounds could wait. I scan the waiting room where there is one other couple talking quietly in their seats and another man with his head thrown back, snoozing. No Berta.
“Where is she?” There’s an edge to my voice. “How could she have missed?—”
“I let her go.”
My head snaps back to Stone. “You what?”
“I thought I could do it. I wanted to do it.” Stone’s voice breaks. He tears out of my grasp, digging his fingers in his hair as he whirls, the cords of his arms drawing a haphazard map along his skin.
“She’s my mother. I should be able to help her through her worst moments. And I did everything you told me—set up the monitor next to my bed to listen for her. But she didn’t call out. Not until…”
Stone’s unable to finish.
“It’s all right,” I soothe.
“They won’t tell me anything other than she’s fractured her hip.”
“Oh no.”
With the cancer eating at her bones, Mrs. Stalinski’s become unnaturally fragile for her age.
“The doc told me to wait, but I’m about to burst through those doors, alarm or not. I have to know if she’s okay. It’s my fault she’s lying in a hospital with broken bones.” Stone’s voice wrenches.
I grab his face and force him to steady. “Listen to me. There is nothing you could have done. She didn’t call out. She didn’t ask for help. She got out of bed, and as wonderful as she is, your mother is a stubborn mule. Even if Berta stayed, she wouldn’t have heard either.”
Stone moves his head, shaking out of my hold, his eyes hazy with pain and responsibility. “I should’ve protected her. Slept next to her. Prevented this.”
“I’ll sort this out.” I draw my shoulders up. “My credentials will get me past that door. Is Dr. Silver here?”
Stone nods, his stare remaining vacant. Somewhere else. “She’s talking to the orthopedic surgeon.”
Surgeon. My stomach plummets.
“I’ll track them down and get answers.” I turn to the doors, but Stone’s voice stops me.
“Thank you, Lavender. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I give him my profile, lowering my chin in a half nod. “I’d do more if I could.”
Stone doesn’t answer. He folds his arm, an intimidating tower in a sea of hunched, worried people in the waiting room.
I know him, though.
No matter what I say, he’ll blame himself.
Dr. Silver and the orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Patel, give me the answers I need, none of them good.
I return to Stone in the waiting room. He’s wide awake despite the early hour, staring off at nothing.
As soon as he spots me, he jerks upright.
“She’ll need hip surgery.” I communicate the bad news as best I can, and as fast as I can.
“But you knew that since Dr. Silver consulted with a surgeon. The problem is your mom’s ability to handle anesthesia.
Her immune system’s compromised. In this situation, it’s good she hasn’t restarted chemo yet, but with the way she is now, there’s about a fifty-fifty chance she’ll pull through. ”
Stone swallows. “And if we choose not to do the surgery?”
I work my jaw back and forth. “It wouldn’t be good. She’d be in a lot of pain. The doctors are talking to your mom shortly. You can go on back and see her.”
“Have you seen her?”
I shake my head.
In answer, Stone holds out his hand. And he says the three words I dreamed he would say when I rewrote our past and had him stay ten years ago.
“I need you.”
His fingers intertwine with mine when I take his hand, and we both walk to Mrs. Stalinski’s room together.
She’s sitting upright in her private hospital room (probably a demand of Stone’s), her eyes closed with purple bruising underneath.
A thin blanket covers her. If we hadn’t been told she’d fractured her hip, I’d think she was comfortably resting after a doctor’s checkup.
There isn’t much to wrap a hip in, other than to keep it as still as possible.
Stone walks up to one side of her bed. I go on the other, careful of the morphine drip hanging on an IV stand, the button close to Mrs. Stalinski’s slack hand.
“They have her on a lot of drugs,” Stone observes when his mother doesn’t twitch as he takes her hand.
“The best pain meds available,” I assure him. “She doesn’t feel a thing.”
Stone cups his mother’s hand in both of his own. Then he drops his head and cries.
I go to him, rounding the bed and twisting him to face me, though he resists. Stone hates crying. He always has. To him, it’s a weakness he will never give someone else to wield against him.
But it’s me.
“Stone. Stone, Stone …” I repeat his name in soft bursts, each a beckoning call, until he folds into me, his tears coating the side of my neck.
I reach up, hugging as much of his broad frame as I can and holding on tight. My hands span his back, his bones and tendons rippling with agony as he moans into my skin.
“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s a nothing statement, but that’s okay, because nothing helps in this situation. Nobody can make it better.
It’s at that moment the two doctors come in, their faces grim.
Stone lifts his head, moving his hands to my shoulders and gripping tight.
“Give it to me straight,” he says hoarsely.
And they do.