Chapter 24 Phylogenetic Reconstruction
PHYLOGENETIC RECONSTRUCTION
*Samantha*
Waking up in the hospital is nothing like the movies.
There is no dramatic beeping, no distant sirens, no heroic blur of action.
It is just the dense, gluey awareness of a body that is not working the way you remember, and the certainty that you are being watched by an audience with at least three graduate degrees between them.
Also, there are more wires.
The first sensation was a weightless pressure on my right hand.
Not the cold clinical clamp of a blood pressure cuff or a nurse’s indifferent touch, but the clutch of a person who deeply cared if I woke up or not.
I hovered there, in a swamp of anesthetic and somewhere between sleep and lucidity, and let my brain reconstruct the scene through the sticky filter of post-trauma.
Plus whatever painkillers they’d given me.
There was the beeping, of course, my pulse monitor perhaps.
There was the antiseptic tang that had been etched into my hippocampus by months of exposure to emergency rooms and a sick grandparent.
There was the weight on my face, which registered as a dull ache first and then as a sharp, cartoonish throbbing the moment I thought about moving my head.
I tried to open both eyes. Only one complied. The other was fused shut with either swelling or the world’s most aggressive adhesive tape. The sunlight that slithered through the blinds was both beautiful and toxic. I let the open eye close again.
Someone said, “I think she’s waking up.”
The voice belonged to Diya. Even with the cotton stuffing my skull, I’d know that voice anywhere. Warm, practical, and lightly laced with worry. I made a noise that could have meant “good morning” or “kill me,” depending on your translation.
Diya said, “Sam, can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can hear you,” I said. Or tried to. The sound came out as a low, sandpapered croak, but the effort was enough to send a wave of recognition through the hand holding mine.
“I’m so glad. You gave us a real scare. And you don’t have to open your eyes if you don’t want to. Your left eye is pretty swollen, but your right eye is okay. It might hurt to open either of them, however. And don’t try to move your body. You have two broken ribs.”
I attempted a nod, which was a mistake. A bolt of pain shot down the left side of my face and straight into my jaw.
I winced and kept my head still. I could hear someone else in the room, breathing through their teeth, and then a string of foreign words that sounded like the cursing you save for when the toilet overflows while visiting an acquaintance’s place. The curser was obviously Andreas.
I curled my fingers around the hand in mine and said, “Andreas?”
He answered instantly, “I’m here.”
Relief hit me like oxygen after a long-held breath and tears pooled in my good eye. My chin wobbled with the effort of not crying, because crying would likely make everything more painful.
Andreas, apparently sensing my unsteadiness, said, “Do not cry. You are safe.”
I felt the warmth of his lips, gentle and deliberate, pressing against the back of my hand. “You are safe. It is all over,” he said. The words should have made me want to laugh at the finality, but all they did was make my vision blur.
I croaked, “Is Kaitlyn okay? How is Joey?”
A new voice answered, “Kaitlyn and Joey are perfect. Not a scratch.”
I didn’t have to open my eye to know it was Martin. The sound of him—so steady, so unbending—was its own anesthesia.
I said, “I am so sorry. I am so sorry they got dragged into this—”
Martin cut me off. “Stop apologizing. I just came in to check on you and make sure you’re okay. Kaitlyn will be in again soon.”
There was the soft squeeze of a hand near my ankle—Martin’s, I guessed—and then, “Try to get some rest.”
I heard his footsteps fade, then the hush of the door closing behind him. Instinct wanted me to be clever, to say something that would erase the sadness and worry in everyone’s voices, or at least make it seem like I could handle the pain.
Instead, I lay there, breathing, while Andreas’s thumb rubbed mindless patterns on the back of my hand.
Diya’s voice returned, soft but so clear. “I’ll give you two some privacy, but I’ll be back soon to check vitals again. If Sam wants to go back to sleep, she should. There is no sign of concussion.”
Andreas said, “Thank you, Diya.” His voice sounded rough.
I listened as Diya’s sensible shoes squeaked out of the room. Silence, at last. Or almost. I could hear the faint sounds of the hospital and the tap of Andreas’s heel on the tile.
He brought my hand up to his forehead and just held it there for a long moment.
When he finally spoke, the words tumbled out like pebbles over a cliff, nothing smooth about it. “I understand that you need to do things your way and make decisions for yourself, but you have to understand that I cannot lose you.”
I tried to form a sentence, but my brain was a bowl of day-old oatmeal.
It didn’t matter. Andreas barreled on, his accent deepening with every syllable: “If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, you have to call me and talk to me. Just like you need to be consulted, I also need to be consulted. I have to matter to you, and factor into your decisions. I love you. And when I thought I would never see you again, I honestly did not know what to do. I mean it, I cannot lose you. I cannot.” There was a break in his voice that made my own heart ache.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was.
He sniffed hard, and I could feel the splash of hot tears on my fingers. “You have to apologize to me one hundred times for this.”
My body wanted to laugh, but it came out as a short breath. “I love you,” I said. “And I’m so sorry.”
“Go to sleep,” he said, sniffing again and pressing my palm to his cheek. “Sleep. And I will be here when you wake up.”
* * *
Once you’re past the initial shock of hospitalization, it’s just boredom and a parade of well-wishers.
Some bear food, some bear flowers, and other bear gossip.
I’d spent exactly seventy-six hours under the fluorescent tyranny of the hospital lights, long enough to master the bed controls.
My discharge instructions included a pamphlet on “gentle stretching,” a full page on “managing emotional trauma,” and a section on “when to return to sexual activity” that Diya had underlined in two colors and left, not anonymously, on my bedside table.
Andreas took the instructions literally.
All of them. He briefed me on the correct positioning for sleeping, sitting, standing, and (in case I forgot) breathing.
My only escape was the bathroom, which afforded me privacy for a few precious moments before he began to knock, ask if I was okay and if I needed help.
Back at his apartment, he installed me in his bed like a rare orchid.
He went to the trouble of swapping out all the sheets for even softer, higher thread count ones.
He suggested we buy a hospital-style trapeze bar to help me sit up without flexing my abs.
But when I tried to point out all the ways the trapeze bar might be fun for other activities, he glared at me as though he found my flippancy toward the gravity of my medical condition both an affront and a disappointment.
Basically, Andreas hovered so aggressively that I actually grew a little sick of him.
But that’s where I was, four weeks later, still propped up on a mound of pillows, one rib still sending out the occasional ping of protest, a thick book in my lap, and the residual feeling that I’d been both swaddled and imprisoned.
From the next room, I heard, “Are you hungry?”
I looked up, blinking out of my reading trance, and found Andreas in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest like he was auditioning for the role of Perpetually Concerned Boyfriend in a pharmaceutical ad.
Lifting my eyebrows, I said, “Didn’t you just feed me a half hour ago?” My face was fully healed and I would never take my eyebrows or eyelids for granted ever again.
He ignored my question. “I want to ensure you do not require anything.”
I grinned, half irritated and half smitten. “As I’ve said many times, I am fully recovered and fine. You do not need to keep waiting on me.”
He frowned, as if this was a personal slight to his dignity. “I like waiting on you.”
Before I could formulate a response, the doorbell rang.
Andreas glanced at his watch. “That should be Diya. Or Tara.”
He vanished from the doorway, leaving only a faint smell of espresso and rosemary.
I put a finger in my book and let my head flop back against the pillows.
For the record, I was fine. Diya had come by recently and pronounced my healing “well above baseline.” Kaitlyn had delivered at least four casseroles—none of which Andreas let me eat, citing my body’s need for a low-sodium diet to reduce inflammation—and Tara had dropped off enough sports drinks to hydrate an entire marathon.
Nakita hadn’t come by, which was probably for the best since Andreas grew tense when she was mentioned.
But she called often, sometimes twice a day, with live updates from the chess world and her patented blend of compliments and obscenity.
Last week, she’d spent a full ten minutes recapping an influencer scandal involving a model, a side hustle, and three liters of coconut water.
Her stories were, as always, better than television.
Because I was still technically housebound, Tara had volunteered herself as daytime distraction.
She showed up with a sandwich most days, sat on the edge of the bed, and gave me play-by-plays of her most recent kickboxing classes.
She seemed more relaxed now that Henrik had been locked up, and if she was bored during our visits, she didn’t let it show.
The first thing Tara did when she entered the room today was raise a white paper bag and say, “It’s a cheesesteak, since I know you’ll only get rabbit food here.”