20. Jonah
JONAH
I’ve been sitting in this waiting room for four hours and twenty-three minutes.
Not that I’m counting. The vinyl chair stopped being comfortable three hours and fifty-eight minutes ago.
My back aches. My eyes burn. The fluorescent lights overhead flicker every seven minutes with mechanical precision, like the building itself is sighing.
Max lies at my feet, his head resting on my shoe. He hasn’t moved much. Every now and then, he lets out a soft whine—picking up on my tension, or maybe carrying his own.
I should leave. That would be the rational response to what Lila said. The meaning was clear—this partnership ran its course. The logical next step would be to call a taxi, find a motel, and start arranging my return to the university.
And yet, I’m still here.
“You look like you need this more than I do.”
I glance up to find a nurse holding out a paper cup of coffee. Her scrubs are wrinkled, and dark circles under her eyes suggest she’s been here far longer than I have.
“Thank you,” I say, accepting the lukewarm offering. It tastes terrible, but the gesture itself is worth more than the coffee.
“Your wife’s going to be okay,” she says kindly. “Those cuts on her feet looked worse than they are.”
I nod, feeling a dull ache in my chest at the nurse’s words.
Lila isn’t my wife—wasn’t anything to me anymore, not after her sharp dismissal.
The image of us together, side by side in the storm, chasing tornadoes and building a future where we made the world safer, flickers in my mind like a distant lightning strike.
It was a dream of a life we might have had.
But now, that future feels like shattered glass, jagged and painful.
The nurse pats my shoulder gently before moving on to the next occupant, her kindness a fleeting warmth against the chill settling in my bones.
I’m left alone again, grappling with the weight of what could have been and the emptiness of what is.
Lila’s voice comes back to me—not the words exactly, but the register of them.
The way she said what she said like she’d been saving it. Like she’d been waiting for a reason.
Max shifts against my foot. I reach down and press my hand into the warm scruff of his neck and stay there a moment, bent forward, elbows on my knees, looking at nothing.
I have a return flight I could book. A department that expects me back. A life that has been waiting patiently in my absence, exactly as I left it. The rational thing—the Jonah thing—would be to call a cab, find a motel, and begin the orderly process of putting this behind me.
I don’t move.
Fuck, how am I going to walk away from her after everything. It’s what she wants, I should respect that, but it’s far from what I want.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s a text from Lucas.
Heard about the tornado. Are you okay? Call me ASAP.
I should answer him, but what would I say? That I survived a direct hit from a tornado only to have the woman I’m falling for blame me for destroying the last connection to her father? I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room despite being told in no uncertain terms that I’m not wanted here.
I pocket the phone without responding. I’ll call him when I have the emotional bandwidth to explain this mess.
“Are you Jonah?”
A woman appears in the doorway of the waiting room, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail that’s coming loose on one side.
She shares Lila’s sharp cheekbones but has softer eyes, worry lines etched around them like faint scars.
Her faded blue scrubs suggest she came straight from work.
As I look up, she approaches, extending her hand, a silver bracelet glinting on her wrist. “I’m Emily. Lila’s sister.”
I take her hand, giving it a firm shake before she settles into the chair beside me, a sigh escaping her lips that seems to deflate her entire frame.
The scent of antiseptic and stale coffee clings to her.
“I wanted to thank you for calling me. I know she wouldn’t have wanted to worry me, but you made the right call. ”
“Of course,” I say, shifting to face her. Max lifts his head at the movement, then settles it back on my shoe with a sigh. “She needed someone here for her.”
Emily studies me with the same direct gaze Lila has, though there’s something softer around the edges. “You stayed” she observes. “Even after what she said.”
My stomach tightens. “She told you.”
“Some of it.” Emily leans back in the vinyl chair, rubbing her temples. “Enough to know my sister was being...well, my sister.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I barely know Emily beyond our brief phone conversations, and I’m not sure how much Lila would want me to share about our complicated relationship. If we even have a relationship anymore.
“She’s always been like this,” Emily continues when I don’t respond. “When she’s hurting, she lashes out. Pushes people away before they can leave on their own.” She gives me a sideways look. “Dad was the only one who could really handle her when she got like that.”
“The truck,” I say quietly. “That’s what set her off.”
Emily nods, her expression clouding. “That truck was everything to her. Their special place.” She pulls at a loose thread on her scrubs.
“After Dad died, she practically lived in it. Wouldn’t let anyone else drive it after she dumped every cent she had to rebuild it, wouldn’t sell it even when she needed the money to go to college.
She kept it, and followed in his footsteps just to feel like she was close to him again. ”
I think about Lila’s face when she saw the truck upside down, the complete devastation on her face. It was like watching something break in real time.
“I understand why she’s upset,” I say quietly.
Emily sighs, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. “Look, Jonah, my sister is...” she searches for the right word, “complicated. She doesn’t let people in easily. The fact that she’s this upset with you actually means something.”
“That she hates me?” I offer dryly.
“That she cares enough to be hurt.” Emily gives me a pointed look. “Lila doesn’t waste energy being angry at people who don’t matter to her.”
I consider this, turning the paper coffee cup in my hands. The logic seems backward, but there’s something about it that rings true. I’ve noticed how Lila dismisses most people with casual indifference. Her anger toward me was raw, emotional, unfiltered.
“So what now?” I ask. “She made it clear she doesn’t want me around.”
“Did she, though?” Emily tilts her head. “Or did she lash out because she’s terrified of how much she might need you?”
Something moves through my chest at the word need—a current I don’t have a name for, or maybe one I’ve been refusing to name.
I think about the tornado, the two of us pressed into that bathtub with the walls coming apart around us, and how in those seconds I had said it out loud into the roar of it, not knowing if she could even hear me.
The words had left my mouth and gone somewhere—into the noise, into the dark—and I had meant every syllable with a completeness I’d never felt about anything.
I look down at my hands. There’s plaster dust caught in the creases of my knuckles, a thin white line along my left index finger where the skin split against something in the debris. I press my thumb into it, not hard enough to hurt. Just enough to feel it.
“I don’t think that’s?—”
“You don’t know my sister like I do,” Emily interrupts, leaning closer. “When Dad died, she built walls so high that nobody else could scale them. Not me, not Mom, not her friends. Nobody.” She studies my face with unnerving intensity. “And then somehow you managed to climb over them.”
“I didn’t,” I protest, though the memory of Lila’s lips against mine in that bathtub as the tornado raged around us suggests otherwise. “We’re just research partners.”
Emily’s eyebrow arches in skepticism. “Research partners. Right. That’s why you’re still sitting in this waiting room looking like someone kicked your dog.” She glances down at Max, who whines softly. “No offense, buddy.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Isn’t it always?” Emily sighs, slumping back in her chair. “Look, I’m not saying you should put up with her pushing you away. That’s your call. But I am saying that if you walk away now, she’ll take it as confirmation of everything she already believes.”
“Which is?”
“That people leave. That she’s not worth sticking around for.” Emily’s voice softens. “That loving her is too much work.”
I feel like Emily has just reached into my chest and squeezed my heart directly. Loving? I haven’t even allowed myself to think that far ahead. Or maybe I’ve been actively avoiding it.
“I don’t—” I start, but can’t finish the sentence. Because what would I say? That I don’t love her? That would be a lie. That I do? I’m not ready to make that declaration, especially not to her sister.
Emily watches me struggle, her expression softening. “You don’t have to say anything. Your face already did.”
I clear my throat, looking down at Max, who has shifted to press his warm weight against my leg. “What do you suggest I do?”
“Go back in there,” she says simply. “Be the person who doesn’t leave when it gets hard.”
“I was trying to respect her wishes.”
“No, you were protecting yourself.” Emily’s directness reminds me so much of Lila that it’s almost painful. “Which I get. Self-preservation is a hell of a drug. But if you want any chance with my sister, you’re going to have to risk getting hurt again.”
Part of me wants to argue with Emily. To tell her she’s wrong about me protecting myself, that I was just being respectful of Lila’s boundaries.
But the knot in my stomach tells me she’s right.
I’ve been sitting in this waiting room not just out of concern, but because I’m afraid to face what comes next.
“I don’t know if I can fix this,” I admit quietly.