17. Rick
Rick
The drive to St. Anthony’s was a blur of flashing brake lights, screeching tires, and a suffocating, heavy silence that pressed down on my chest until I could barely breathe.
Sofia sat beside me, her light touch on my arm the only thing anchoring me to the earth as I pushed the Audi through the evening traffic.
When we burst through the sliding glass doors of the emergency room, the sterile smell of bleach and isopropyl alcohol hit me like a physical wall.
“Rick!”
I turned to see Jax standing near the triage desk.
I had never seen my brother look like this.
His hair was completely disheveled, his shirt was untucked, and the raw, unadulterated panic bleeding from his eyes made my stomach violently drop.
Standing right beside him, her hand resting firmly on his arm to keep him upright, was Nova.
She looked pale but fierce, holding him together by sheer force of will.
Much like Sofia was doing to me at the moment.
“Where is he? Where’s Mom?” I demanded, my voice cracking as we reached them.
“They took him back to the cath lab,” Jax choked out, his voice thick and trembling.
“Mom went back with them. He… dad’s friend Bill said he just collapsed on the ninth green, Rick.
One second they were laughing about a putt, and the next…
” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He shook his head, burying his face in his hands.
Bill Frisco was one of my father’s longtime friends, and he was a doctor. At the moment he was standing at the nurses’ station, talking on the phone.
Nova immediately stepped into the space, her voice calm but tight with emotion. “The doctors are working on him now. Your mom is with him. I was at the office helping Jax finish up the retail spreadsheets when we got the call. We got here as fast as we could.”
Before I could even process her words, the sliding doors of the main entrance opened again.
I looked up and was surprised to see a couple rush into the waiting room looking anxious and out of breath.
Sofia let out a soft, sharp breath beside me and moved toward them.
Instantly, I understood that this was her parents.
Sofia had texted them from the car, and they had come down here to be with us.
Her father wrapped Sofia in a massive hug, while her mother walked straight over to me, her eyes filled with a deep empathy. She placed a gentle, warm hand on my shoulder. “Hi, I’m Lisa, Sofia’s mom. We figured we’d come down and be here, for whatever you and your family needed.”
“Thank you,” I muttered, the words feeling hollow and heavy in my throat.
Nova walked over and gave Sofia’s parents a hug and started talking to them.
For the next forty-five minutes, the waiting room became a purgatory of ticking clocks and low murmurs.
Sofia’s parents sat quietly with her and Nova in the corner, giving my family space but staying close enough to offer silent support.
Sofia kept her eyes locked on me, her gaze a steady, comforting anchor while I paced the floor.
My mind was racing through a thousand memories of my dad.
The arguments we’d had, the advice he’d given, the way he laughed.
God, I couldn’t lose him. Jax sat frozen in a plastic chair, staring blankly at the floor.
My youngest brother, Chris, had arrived sometime shortly after I had.
Since he was currently going to med school and knew most of the nurses, he often disappeared and came back with as many details as he could get.
The doors leading to the restricted medical wing swung open, and my mother walked out by herself.
The entire waiting room seemed to lose its oxygen in a single second. I stopped dead in my tracks, my shoes freezing against the floor. Jax stood up slowly, and Chris stared blankly ahead.
We didn’t need a doctor to step out behind her. We didn’t need to hear the clinical words, or the time of death, or the apologies. The moment our eyes locked onto our mother’s face, we all knew he was gone.
Her shoulders, usually so straight and proud, were slumped.
Her face was perfectly pale, her eyes red and swimming with a devastating, empty grief.
She looked down at her hands, which were trembling violently, before lifting her head to look at us, her three sons.
She didn’t say a word, but the slight, heartbreaking shake of her head told the entire story.
The heartbeat of the Mylonas family, of the marketing empire, the man who had built everything from the ground up, was gone.
A choked, ragged sob tore from Jax’s throat, and he collapsed back into the chair, completely breaking down. Chris buried his face in his hands.
I stood there, completely frozen for a moment, as the room spun around me while the reality of a world without my father crashed onto my shoulders.
Then I rushed forward, along with Jax and Chris, and we engulfed our mother, holding her upright and tight, silently promising that whatever happened next, her three sons would be there.
We weren’t gone. We weren’t going anywhere.
I don’t know how long we stood like this.
The four of us. No longer the five of us.
That in itself was strange. My brain couldn’t comprehend the fact that he was really gone.
Eventually, we were shown into a private room, and I stood, staring into space, while my mother sat and cried softly into her hands.
But before the darkness could swallow me entirely, a pair of soft arms wrapped around my waist. Sofia pressed her face flush against my chest, holding onto me with everything she had, letting me lean into her weight as the tears finally blurred my vision.
She said something, but I couldn’t register the words. I couldn’t focus enough to make sense of anything.
Sometime later, we left the hospital. Sofia drove my car. I didn’t even know where we were heading. I didn’t care.
My father, the man who had taught me everything I knew, everything about how to be a child, a boy, a man, the one who had been the pillar of our family, was really gone.
The next thing I registered was the car stopping. I looked out the windshield and realized that Sofia had brought us to my parents’ house.
Sitting at the very crest of the hill, the massive five-bedroom contemporary estate loomed against the darkened Colorado sky.
It was a sprawling masterpiece of exposed timber beams, stacked native stone, and soaring walls of glass.
Down below, rolling out like a dark, velvety carpet, was the exclusive golf course—the very place where my father’s heart had given out only hours before.
From this height, the property commanded a breathtaking view that swept from the rugged foothills framing Golden all the way to the twinkling grid of Denver in the distance.
I hadn’t grown up in this house. My dad had had it built as his crowning achievement just a few years before I packed up and set out on my own to make my own mark.
It was the house of a man who had finally made it.
But despite its massive footprint, it didn’t feel like a cold museum.
My mother had seen to that. She had balanced the sharp, modern architectural lines with cozy, oversized leather furniture, thick woven rugs, and curated landscape art that made the grand spaces feel intimate.
Right now, though, the warm landscape lighting illuminating the stone facade just felt hollow.
Sofia cut the engine. The silence that followed was heavy, almost physical.
“I’m here if you need anything,” she said, her voice a gentle lifeline in the dark. She reached across the console, her fingers slipping into mine and squeezing tight.
I nodded slowly, my throat too tight to speak. When I opened the door, the crisp, thin mountain air hit my face, shocking a bit of the numbness out of my limbs.
Vehicles were pulling into the wide driveway behind us. Jax and Nova got out of his truck, Jax looking like a ghost of himself, his shoulders hunched. Chris arrived right behind them, his face set in a grim, rigid mask as he helped our mother out of the passenger seat.
We walked inside as a fractured unit. The grand entryway, with its soaring two-story ceiling and view straight through the great room to the lights of the valley far below us, felt entirely too big without my dad’s booming voice echoing through it.
“Let’s get you into the sitting room, Mom,” Chris said softly, his voice tight as he guided her toward the hearth.
The hearth was the heart of the house—a massive, double-sided stone fireplace that separated the main living area from the kitchen. I immediately stepped up to get my mother settled by guiding her to one of the plush, deep-seated sofas.
“I’ll get you some water,” Sofia said, and I motioned her toward the kitchen.
Jax had collapsed onto a chair, burying his face in his hands. Nova sat right next to him, offering the exact kind of quiet, steady support he needed.
I walked over to the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that looked out over the dark expanse of the golf course. The city lights of Denver blurred into a streak of gold and white in the distance. I felt a presence step up beside me, and a second later, Sofia’s hand slid into mine.
“He loved this view,” I whispered, the words scratching against my throat. “He used to stand right here with a glass of scotch and tell me that, if you work hard enough, you can see your entire future right out there.”
Sofia didn’t try to offer empty platitudes. She just leaned her head against my shoulder, her warmth seeping through my jacket, grounding me to the floor of the house my father had built.
The house fell into a heavy, exhausting quiet as the hours ticked by. My mother finally broke, the sheer weight of the grief completely draining her, and Chris gently guided her upstairs to the master bedroom so she could lie down.
When he walked back down the stairs, his eyes met mine, and we exchanged a silent, heavy nod. The immediate shock was wearing off, leaving behind a raw, aching reality that we were going to have to manage together.
I turned to Sofia, who was still standing near me, her eyes clouded with an intense, fierce worry that cut straight through my numbness. But she looked exhausted, and this was our storm to weather. Not hers.
“Let me drive you home,” I murmured, my voice rough and low as I reached for my keys on the counter where she had put them.
She instantly stepped into my space, her hands coming up to rest against my chest, her dark eyes looking up at me with fierce resistance. “Absolutely not. Look at you. You are in no condition to drive right now.”
I placed my hands over hers, squeezing gently, trying to inject some reassurance into my tone even though my chest felt completely hollow.
“I’m going to hang here for tonight. To be here for my mom, Jax, and Chris.
We’re going to stay here, pour a drink, and just…
be together. We need to talk through some things before tomorrow hits us.
” I offered her a small, weak attempt at a reassuring smile. “I promise you, I’m okay.”
She stared at me, clearly torn, her protective instincts warring with the understanding that my brothers and I needed this sacred, uninterrupted time with each other to process losing our anchor.
“I’ll take her home in Jax’s truck.” Nova’s voice cut in softly from across the room as she motioned toward Jax.
He nodded and handed her the keys. “Thanks,” he said softly.
“Sure thing,” she said as a look passed between them, then she hugged him quickly and motioned for Sofia.
Sofia looked back at me, searching my face one last time. Seeing the quiet finality in my eyes, she finally relented with a soft sigh. “Okay,” she whispered. “But you call me if you need anything. I don’t care what time it is.”
“I will,” I promised.
She leaned up on her tiptoes, wrapped her arms around my neck, and pulled me down into a deep, fierce hug that felt like the only warm thing in the entire world.
She kissed my cheek, lingered for a fraction of a second, and then stepped back.
After giving Jax and Chris quiet goodbyes, she followed Nova out the front door into the crisp mountain air.
The click of the lock echoing through the grand entryway signaled the true beginning of the long night ahead. I walked over to the liquor cabinet, grabbed a bottle of my dad’s favorite scotch and four glasses, and walked back to the hearth where my brothers were waiting.
“To Dad,” I said after pouring three fingers into each glass and handing one to each of my brothers. I set the fourth on the hearth for our dad.
“To Dad,” they agreed, and we drank.