36. What’s Left of Me
What’s Left of Me
Summer
The clinic near the Ridge looks nothing like the hospital back in Rosefield.
Smaller. Older. Half the exterior lights are dead, so whole stretches of the parking lot sit drowned in dark as Adelaide tears into it far too fast. The SUV fishtails on the turn and a man crossing near the entrance throws himself backward out of the way.
"Fucking move!" Adelaide screams out the window.
I stare at her, because Adelaide doesn't swear.
Not once, in all the years I've known her—not when she broke her wrist falling off my porch railing at sixteen, not at her own mother's funeral.
And here she is, white-knuckled over a stranger's steering wheel, snarling at a man in a parking lot like she'd run him down without slowing.
That's what tonight has done to all of us.
It's reached inside the people I love and pulled out things I've never seen before.
She doesn't even register it as she slams us into park, crooked across two spaces.
Another car screeches in beside us at almost the same second, and a woman in dark scrubs is out of it before her engine's off—hair loose and wild, face frantic, genuinely shaken.
Two nurses come out through the emergency doors behind her, pushing a gurney.
Private logos on their chests, different from any I've seen.
The kind of place that doesn't have its name on the road.
"Room's ready," one of them says.
The woman nods once. Then her eyes land on Jacob, and the panic hits her face all at once, and I watch it happen the way you watch a glass tip off a counter—too slow to stop, too fast to look away from.
"Oh my God." The back door flies open and cold night air pours in over us. "Jacob."
Her voice cracks around his name as she reaches for him, and he grunts low in his throat as the movement jars his shoulder, and under the flat white lot lights I finally see how bad it is.
The whole left side of his shirt is soaked through, black more than red now, gone stiff and shining.
I've had my hands pressed to it for what feels like hours and somehow I hadn't let myself see the size of it until this second.
"I need you on the gurney," she says.
"No." Even gray and half-conscious, he finds the breath to argue. "I'm walking."
"You were shot."
"Still. Got. Legs," he hisses as he pulls himself to a seated position.
One of the nurses mutters, “Jesus Christ.”
I would laugh if I had anything left to laugh with, because of course he does this. Of course. Bleeding out in a parking lot in the middle of the night and still too stubborn to be carried the length of a corridor.
But instead of arguing with her, he turns his back on the woman entirely—on the gurney, on the nurses, on all of it—and looks at me.
"You okay?"
And that's what undoes me. Not the wound. Not the blood. That he can barely hold his own head up and the first thing he needs to know is whether I'm all right.
I nod too fast. "I'm fine."
It's a lie. It's an enormous, obvious lie.
My wrists are raw and weeping where the rope was, my broken fingers won't close right, my throat feels like it's been torn out and stuffed back in wrong, and underneath all of it, somewhere I still can't turn and look at directly, there's the deep spreading ache of what they did in that room.
But none of it matters. I've made a small, fierce religion out of it not mattering.
Every ounce of me that's still working is pointed at him.
They get him upright, and I go straight to his uninjured side, and his weight tips into me on instinct the moment I'm there—like his body reaches for me before his mind can.
Like he needs the contact as badly as I do.
And I do. God, I do. Touching him is the only thing tonight that has felt like proof I survived.
The woman notices. Something flickers across her face and is gone before I can name it.
Jacob drops his forehead to mine to catch his breath, and for one second the parking lot narrows to just that—his skin against mine, both of us breathing, alive. Then his eyes narrow. His hand lifts, weak and shaking, to my face.
"What's that?"
"What?"
His thumb brushes across my cheekbone, feather-light, and pain flares white and sudden—and I realize I never even felt it happen. Somewhere on that mountain something struck me hard enough to mark me and I have no memory of it at all. My body has been keeping a list I stopped reading days ago.
His whole face changes. Goes dark and still.
Then his eyes drop. To my wrists. To the weeping sores and the deep purple bands and the places where the skin gave.
And I feel him go rigid beside me, feel the change move through his whole body like something cold poured down his spine, and I know exactly what he's seeing. He's reading them like a report. Each mark a sentence. Building the whole story off my skin.
"You need checking too."
"I'm fine, Jacob. I—"
"No." Harder now, rougher, something cracking under it. "You're getting checked."
"I'm not leaving your side." The words climb up out of my ruined throat, and I mean them with everything I have left. "I'm never leaving your side again."
Something raw breaks across his face at that—there and gone, too fast, like he can't afford to let me see the whole of it—and his eyes fall shut, and he presses his forehead hard to mine like he can hold us both together by sheer contact.
"I want you checked, Summer," he grunts. Every word sounds like it hurts. "I want a nurse to at least look you over. Please. Even if we're in the same room."
I nod. “Okay.”
The woman clears her throat. "We need to move. Now."
They get him onto the gurney only after his knees actually buckle in the doorway, his blood loss finally winning the argument his pride kept losing. He looks furious about it the entire way in.
The corridors are too quiet. Wrong-quiet.
This isn't her usual hospital—I clock it almost the second we're through the doors, from the way she moves, quick but glancing, like even she half doesn't belong here.
But the staff know her well enough not to ask a single question.
A nurse swipes us through a locked door without a word.
Another keeps her eyes carefully off the blood painting all three of us.
Nobody mentions police. Nobody asks our names.
Nobody asks what happened to a man with a bullet hole in him and two women covered in gore at three in the morning.
They wheel him into a private room and I stay welded to him.
The nurse checks me where I sit. She shines a light into my eyes, listens to my chest, counts bruises she can't hide the reaction to, and asks questions I answer with little more than nods.
Jacob never lets go of my hand. When she asks me to lift an arm or turn my head, I move closer to him; close enough that I can still feel him against my skin.
The second they cut his shirt open my stomach turns hard, because the wound is so much worse laid bare under the lights—his shoulder and side streaked thick and glistening, the hole itself an ugly looking thing.
The woman—Tamara, I've pieced together—starts cleaning around it with hands that move like they've done this a thousand times, and Jacob hisses through his teeth.
"Easy," she murmurs.
Too soft. And then her hand drags across his chest as she leans in, and that's too soft too. Too slow. Too familiar with skin that isn't hers to be familiar with.
Something twists low and hot in me. Jealousy, quick and ugly and entirely without dignity—and right beneath it, absurdly, a flush of shame, because I understand in that instant exactly what Jacob felt all those nights ago watching me sway against Benny—no—Kurt in the low light of the Dogwood.
This is what it is. This helpless, animal mine rising up the back of your throat while you watch someone else's hands find the person you'd burn the world for.
"Bullet went clean through," she says. "Best case. No fragments, less damage." And then her fingers trail down the length of his forearm. Again. Slow. "You scared the shit out of me, Jacob."
The words aren't the crime. The tone is.
There's a warmth threaded through it that makes my jaw ache from clenching—the kind of warmth that belongs behind a closed door, in the dark, between two people with a history.
Not out here, in the light, in front of me, while she stitches up the man I am going to spend my whole life loving.
Jacob's eyes cut to my face and hold. "Tamara." Low. Flat. A warning I've heard him use on armed men.
She ignores it. Checks his pulse. Lets her hand slide over his and settle there, like it belongs.
That's it.
"I need the surgical kit," she says at last—and squeezes his hand, and holds on a beat too long, and looks at me while she does it.
Something in me that's been stretched to breaking all night finally snaps clean in half.
I follow her out.
She barely makes it two feet down the corridor before I've got the door shut at my back, and when she turns and sees my face, she knows precisely why I'm here. And she smiles. Slow. Satisfied. Like a woman who thinks she's already won something she was never actually on the prize table.
"Back in the room," I say.
Her brow arches. The smile doesn't so much as flicker. "Excuse me?"
"You heard me. Move."
She studies me a moment, taking her time, deciding I'm not worth the fright. Then she shakes her head and steps past me and walks back in with a glance thrown over her shoulder like she's humoring a child. I follow, and the air in the room changes the instant I pull the door shut behind us.
Jacob's eyes move between the two of us. Tense. Like he already knows exactly where this is going and hasn't got the strength left to stand between it.
"Okay," I say, and I'm surprised by how calm it comes out. "Let's just get this handled while we're all here."
Tamara folds her arms and leans back against the wall, working very hard at looking bored.
"Summer…" Jacob starts.
"No." I don't take my eyes off her. "Because I'm not stupid, and I'm too tired to pretend I am." I point at him on the bed. "You see that man?"
Something in her face closes, just slightly.
"He's my fiancé. And tonight he turned the entire fucking world upside down to get to me.
He walked into a house he knew might kill him.
He nearly died on a corridor floor with my name in his mouth.
" My voice is shaking now and I let it. "So you can keep your hands professional and your bitchy pining to yourself. "
Silence. Then she pushes off the wall, steps in close, and lets out one short, cold laugh.
"Wow." She tilts her head, examining me like something on a slide. "I know daddy was the DA, sweetheart, but you really don't get to tell me what to do."
And it's the wrong word. On the wrong night.
Of all the things she could have reached for, she reaches for daddy—and it drops the floor out from under me and I'm back on that mountain, back in that room, back drowning in everything Papa was and everything he did and every life his wanting cost, Annalise and Harris's Sarah and the women in that warehouse and me, me tied to a bed as the last installment on a debt I never knew he owed—
My hand swings before I've decided anything at all.
CRACK.
Her head snaps sideways.
The sound of it hangs in the room. My chest is heaving. My palm sings. She turns back to me slowly, one hand rising to her cheek, pure astonishment on her face—like it genuinely never occurred to her that the DA's soft little daughter might have anything like this in her.
Neither did I, if I'm honest. But there's a lot in me now that wasn't there a week ago. Jackson put most of it there himself, filing me down until this was what was left.
Even Jacob looks stunned.
Good.
She presses her palm flat to a cheek already blooming red, staring at me like she's never seen me before in her life.
Then, very quietly: "I'll go get that kit."
She walks out holding her face, and doesn't look back.
The door's barely shut before there's a soft knock, and Adelaide's head comes cautiously round it, her eyes flicking between both of us, reading the wreckage.
"…What happened in here?"
I lean back against the wall, still breathing hard, my hand still stinging, and for the first time in days something in my chest feels almost quiet.
"Just teaching someone a lesson about trying to get her claws into my man."
Adelaide looks at me. Then at Jacob, bloody and stunned on the bed. Then back at me.
And she shrugs. "Fair."