Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Trevor
Light comes first. Not sunlight — not the kind that filters through trees or windows and makes things look better than they are.
The other kind: flat, buzzing, the wavelength of hospital fluorescents that turn every face the color of bad milk and make you feel worse than you are, which is its own brand of malpractice.
I blink. Once. Twice. The ceiling tiles swim into focus, beige squares with water stains in the corners that someone painted over instead of replacing, the job so half-assed I can still see the outline of whatever leaked.
My head feels packed with cotton and razor wire.
Something beeps to my left — steady, metronomic, the kind of sound that's meant to reassure and instead just tells you something electronic knows your heart's beating, information I could've provided for free.
The chemical bite hits next. Antiseptic.
Industrial-grade, the kind that doesn't just clean surfaces but scours memories, and right now mine could use the scouring, because what's in there isn't doing me any favors.
I try to turn my head and my ribs send up a flare from sternum to spine in one clean, bright line of fuck-you.
Two cracked ribs, minimum. I know the feeling — I've had cracked ribs before, overseas and since, and the body doesn't forget the signature of bone that's decided it would rather be in two pieces than one.
Left hand. IV line. Clear tube taped to the back with more adhesive than the job needs, like the nurse worried I'd make a break for it, which — fair. Right arm. Blood pressure cuff still velcroed loose, the accessory that says someone was monitoring me and might again if I make enough noise.
The bandage comes into focus last. Left temple.
Gauze and tape, the kind of dressing that covers something worse than it looks, and my fingers find the edge without permission and press, gently, and the pain is sharp and specific and tells me exactly how deep the cut goes — deep enough to matter, not deep enough to kill me, which is the story of my medical history in one data point.
Memory returns in pieces. The brain serves trauma in courses, appetizer first, and the appetizer is always the least useful part of the meal.
The lakehouse through the tree line. Green light filtering through oak leaves. The smell of the forest after rain. My boots on soft earth. The phone in my hand, screen hot, thumb sweating on the shutter.
Calloway's cruiser on the gravel drive. The sheriff in civilian clothes — pale blue button-down stretched across his gut, khakis, leather shoes that belonged in an office, not on a lakefront. His face through the viewfinder.
Voss's hand on Hannah's shoulder. Fingers digging into the hoodie. Steering her toward the door with the casual authority of a man who's done it before. Her face — watchful, scared, the jaw of a kid who won't surrender even when surrender's the only move left.
The unmarked sedan. The handshake. Twelve frames of grainy proof that Cole's been right for two years and the town's been wrong for longer.
Then the headlights. The rearview filling with white glare. The truck fishtailing. Gravel under the tires. The guardrail rushing up. The world rotating — once, twice — glass webbing, metal screaming.
Then black. Just black. The kind that has weight and temperature and won't apologize for either.
My right hand moves before the rest of me.
Patting the thin blanket — nothing. The gown — pockets that don't exist. The side table — plastic pitcher, a remote for a TV that isn't on, a floral tissue box someone thought would cheer up a room where people come to remember they're mortal.
No phone. No rectangular weight in my palm where the evidence should be.
I sit up. Too fast. The room tilts — left, right, then settles on an axis a few degrees off from true. My hand finds the bed rail. Grips. The metal's cool and solid and real in a way nothing else here is, and I hold it like the only honest thing in a building full of lies.
The call button's on the rail. I hit it. Once. Hard. The press that says I'm not asking, I'm informing.
She comes in forty seconds later. Mid-forties.
Beige scrubs. Ponytail that's seen better days.
Flat affect — the face of someone who's done this long enough to stop being surprised by anything a patient might say or do.
Her lanyard has a cartoon cat wearing a stethoscope and smiling, which feels like a personal insult given the circumstances.
"You're awake." Not a question. An observation, delivered like she's reading a script she wrote and has since grown tired of.
"My phone." Rougher than I want it. Dry throat, the rasp of a man who hasn't used his voice in however many hours I've been here — a number I don't have and she hasn't offered.
She checks the clipboard at the foot of the bed. Flips a page. Doesn't hurry.
"Personal effects on arrival: wallet, keys, one boot." She looks up. "No phone."
"Check again."
"I already did." The flatness doesn't move. "It wasn't with you when the paramedics brought you in."
"Who was at the scene before the ambulance?"
She shrugs. One shoulder. Minimal effort. "I work the floor, Mr. Hollander. I wasn't there."
It lands all at once. A solid weight dropping through my chest into my stomach, something swallowed whole.
Somebody was at the wreck before the sirens.
Calloway's people — the cruiser, the unmarked sedan, both.
They pulled the phone. Twelve frames of Hannah Brooks.
Twelve frames of Voss's hand on her arm.
Twelve frames of the lakehouse and the handshake and the whole operation laid out in grainy proof.
Gone. Wiped before it could reach Cole, before it could reach Wiseman, before it could do the one thing it existed to do — and it never left the phone, never went anywhere, so when the phone went, all of it went with it.
I swing my legs over the side. The gown rides up. My skin hits cold vinyl. The IV pulls taut. My fingers find the tape, peel — one sharp motion, because slow hurts worse — and the catheter slides out of the back of my hand trailing a single drop of blood that hits the floor between my bare feet.
I stand. The room tilts harder. I brace on the rail and wait for the tilt to become a slide and the slide to become a fall. It doesn't. My legs hold. They've held worse. The Marines taught my body things about staying upright that this hospital doesn't get a vote on.
"You absolutely cannot do that." Her voice finally has something in it — not concern, something adjacent to professional alarm. She takes half a step, hand out like she might restrain me, then thinks better of it. Smart.
"Get me Dr. Parsons." Steady now. The kind that comes from below conscious control, the place where fear gets handled before it reaches the surface. "Now."
She looks at me one long beat. The cartoon cat grins up at both of us, stethoscope and all, unbothered by the fact that everything we've worked for just went up in smoke and I'm standing here in a gown with one bare foot on the linoleum and blood drying on my hand.
She turns and walks out. Doesn't run. The door swings shut behind her with a softness that feels deliberate, like the building's trying not to draw attention to what's happening inside it.
I stand there. Breathing. The ribs grind on every inhale. The bandage throbs in time with my pulse. The cuff hangs loose on my arm like something I forgot to take off.
The phone is gone. Hannah's in that house. Cole's waiting for a text that isn't coming.
I need my clothes.
Dr. Parsons' office is the kind of room that makes you wonder if the hospital budget covers interior design or if someone gave up halfway through and decided clutter was a style.
Charts in leaning towers that defy gravity and sense.
A potted plant on the sill doing a slow-motion surrender to mortality.
The framed diploma hangs crooked, the kind of crooked that's been there long enough to be a feature, because straightening it would mean admitting it's there.
I stand in the doorway. Gown. A strip of tape still hanging off the back of my left hand.
One bare foot, one sock — the sock appeared between the room and here, courtesy of an aide who took one look at me shuffling down the hall and decided dignity, however minimal, was worth saving.
The gown's open at the back. I can feel the draft.
Dr. Lena Parsons comes in already holding my chart. Early forties. Sharp behind wire-rims. Dark hair knotted up like it was done under duress and held by force of will. She moves like someone used to being the most competent person in any room and tired of it.
She doesn't sit. Neither do I. We stand on opposite sides of the desk like it's a negotiation and the desk is the line between us.
"Mild concussion." Flat, finger on the chart.
"Two cracked ribs, left side, posterior.
Laceration along the left temple, fourteen stitches, non-penetrating.
Blood pressure's still unstable from the sedation — 145 over 90.
Not catastrophic, not ideal." She looks up.
"You are not medically cleared to leave, Mr. Hollander. "
"I'm leaving regardless." Steady. The room's stopped tilting, or I've stopped noticing, which is functionally the same. "The only question is whether you sign the AMA paperwork or I walk out without it."
"That's not how this works." No heat. Just fact, from someone who's had this conversation and knows how it ends.
"I did two tours." Even. The kind of even that comes from reciting your medical history to people in uniform while blood dried on your shirt.
"I've been shot — round through the left shoulder, took out a chunk of the deltoid, six months of rehab.
I know exactly what my body can and can't handle.
" I hold her eyes. "Right now it can handle walking. "