Chapter 23 Andrea
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Andrea
I was on the couch with my legs up, half-watching something on my laptop and half-eating cold noodles out of the container, when my phone rang. Hilda’s face filled the screen and I picked up with my mouth full.
“Hi, Gwamwa.”
“Are you eating? You sound like you’re eating.”
“I’m always eating. What’s up?”
“Does something have to be up? Can’t I call my granddaughter?”
“You can. But you usually call on Sundays and it’s Tuesday, so either something’s up or you’ve lost track of what day it is, and either way I’m concerned.”
She laughed and the sound of it made my chest warm because that laugh hadn’t changed since I was five years old and she was chasing me through the garden pretending to be a bear. Same laugh, bright and sharp, and hearing it from five hundred miles away was both a comfort and a gut punch.
“I wanted to hear your voice,” she said. “Is that a crime?”
“Depends. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Andy. I’m always fine.”
“Grandma.”
“What?”
“You just said fine twice in ten seconds. That’s your tell. You say fine when you’re not fine.”
She paused, longer than usual, and I put the noodles down.
“The house is quiet,” she said, and her voice was softer.
“That’s all. It’s quiet. I filled the bird feeder and made dinner and watched my show and then it was eight o’clock and I realized I hadn’t spoken to another person all day except the woman at the pharmacy who told me my prescription was ready. ”
“Grandma...”
“I’m not complaining. I have my garden and my books and my church and I’m fine.
I just...” Another pause. “I miss having someone here. You, your mother, your father. The house used to be loud, remember? Your father played that terrible music in the kitchen and your mother yelled at him about it and you and I would sit on the porch and listen to them argue about whether Bob Dylan was a genius or a noise violation.”
I laughed and it stung behind my eyes. “He was a noise violation.”
“He was both, sweetheart. Your father had terrible taste in music and excellent taste in women and that’s the nicest thing I ever said about him, don’t tell anyone.”
We kept on talking and catching up. She told me about the tomatoes that wouldn’t cooperate and the neighbor’s dog that dug under the fence again and the new roof tiles she needed but couldn’t afford.
I made a mental note to send money this week without telling her, because she’d refuse it and I’d send it anyway and we’d have the same damn argument we’d been having for six years.
“You sound happy,” she said near the end. “Happier than you’ve been in a long time.”
“I am happy.”
“Is it a boy?”
“It might be a boy.”
“What’s his name?”
“Finneas.”
“Finneas? What kind of name is Finneas? Is he British?”
“He’s not British, Grandma.”
“Is he tall?”
“Very.”
“Does he treat you right?”
“He’s working on it.”
“Working on it? That doesn’t sound reassuring.”
“It’s complicated. But yes. He treats me right.”
“Bring him here. I want to see his face. I want to look him in the eye and decide if he deserves my Andy.”
“He’d probably be terrified of you.”
“Good. He should be. Your grandfather was terrified of my mother for forty years and it was the healthiest relationship in the family.”
After we hung up I sat on the couch with my phone in my lap and the noodles going cold.
I missed her so fiercely it felt physical, an ache that settled behind my sternum and pressed.
She’d told me the house was quiet like it was no big deal, but I could hear what she wasn’t saying underneath it, that the rooms felt too big when you’re the only person walking through them, that silence gets louder the longer you sit in it.
I knew because my house in Atlanta felt the same way on the nights he wasn’t there.
The following Thursday I was at my desk reviewing a client contract, the afternoon stretching out normal and unremarkable, when his phone rang inside the office.
I could hear it through the glass. He picked up and I watched his face change through the wall, the color draining, his jaw locking, his whole body going rigid in his chair.
He hung up, stood, grabbed his jacket. When he came out of the office his face was stone.
“What happened?” I asked.
“My mother is in the hospital.”
My stomach dropped. I knew that call. I knew that face. I wore it when I was fifteen and someone called my grandmother’s house and said there had been an accident on the highway.
“What do they know? Is she okay?”
“I don’t know yet. I need to go.”
He was already moving toward the elevator and I grabbed my bag and stood up.
I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands were shaking even as he tried to hold them still, and I wasn’t going to let him walk into that alone.
I knew what it felt like to sit in a hospital waiting room by yourself, staring at a door, wondering if the person behind it was going to come out the same way they went in.
I did it at fifteen. I wasn’t letting him do it now.
“I’m coming with you.”
He hesitated. Looked at me, then at the elevator, then back at me.
“Finneas. I’m coming.”
He nodded.
In the car his hand found mine and he gripped it so hard my knuckles ached.
He didn’t speak the entire drive, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the road, and I didn’t make him.
I watched his face and saw the fear underneath the control, the boy who lost his father at twenty-four trying to hold it together in case he was about to lose his mother too.
I held his hand tighter and didn’t let go.
The hospital was bright and cold, antiseptic smell hitting me the second we walked through the doors.
I stayed close to him without crowding, hovering a step behind while he talked to the doctor in the corridor.
I caught fragments: tumor, rare for a shifter, the healers had confirmed.
My chest tightened with every word because I could see what it was doing to him, each piece of information landing like a blow he was absorbing without flinching.
Then the elevator at the end of the hall opened and Lorraine stepped out with an older woman beside her.
I’d never seen the woman before but the resemblance was impossible to miss: same red hair going silver at the temples, same sharp cheekbones, same posture, like they’d both been taught to walk by the same person who believed spines should be vertical at all times.
Had to be her mother. Both in heels, both looking like they’d come from somewhere expensive.
Lorraine saw him and her face crumbled and she threw herself at him, arms around his neck, sobbing against his shoulder.
“Oh, Finneas.”
I watched and kept my hands at my sides and breathed through the jealousy because Lorraine grew up with Margaret.
Whatever else she was, whatever shit she’d pulled at the office, her concern for his mother looked genuine right now.
I wasn’t going to make a scene in a hospital hallway when the man I loved was scared.
He let her hold him for a few seconds, then pulled her off gently, stepped back, and came to me. Wrapped his arm around my shoulders. The statement was clear. I was here. With him.
“What is she doing here?” The tears dried up so fast it was almost impressive. Her voice went flat, sharp, looking at me with undisguised hostility.
“I asked her to.”
She stared. The older woman, her mother, gave me a slow look from head to toe, cataloguing every flaw, filing them for later. I held both their gazes without blinking because I learned a long time ago that looking away is losing.
The doctor told him his mother was asking for him. He squeezed my hand. “I’ll be right back.” Then he disappeared through the door.
I sat in a plastic hallway chair. Lorraine and her mother sat across from me.
The silence was aggressive, thick enough to chew, but I barely noticed because my eyes were on that door and my mind was on what was happening behind it.
How scared he must be. How alone he must feel in that room with his mother hooked up to monitors, hearing words like tumor.
“So the assistant’s been promoted,” Lorraine said to her mother, loud enough that I could hear every word. Her mascara was smudged, her jaw tight.
I didn’t respond. My hands were clasped in my lap, knuckles white, and I stared at the door.
“I’m talking to you.”
“I know.”
“You don’t belong here. This is family.”
“I’m here for Finneas.”
“He has family. He doesn’t need you.”
I didn’t take the bait. Didn’t look at her, didn’t engage, just kept my eyes on that door because the person I cared about was behind it getting news that could wreck him and I wasn’t going to waste energy on Lorraine’s bullshit right now.
She called me a name under her breath, her mother smirked, and my jaw ached from clenching but I kept my mouth shut.
If I opened it right now what came out wouldn’t be appropriate for a hospital.
Minutes passed. Ten, twenty. I sat with my hands in my lap, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, someone’s monitor beeping down the hall. I watched that door, waited, tried not to think about the last time I sat in a hospital hallway waiting for news about someone I loved.
Then the door opened and he came out and his face was different from when he went in. The stone was still there but something behind his eyes had shifted. A distance, a blankness that I’d never seen on him before, like a light going off behind a window.
I stood immediately. “Are you okay?”
He looked at me and for a second I saw devastation, raw and open, before the mask slid back.
He told Lorraine and her mother that Margaret wanted to see them.
They went in. Lorraine threw a look over her shoulder on her way through the door, a small satisfied smile that said I’m going in and you’re staying out here louder than any words could have.
I put my hand on his arm. “What happened in there?”
“She’s sick. It’s serious.”
“Okay. I’m here. Whatever you need.”
He looked at my hand on his arm, then at my face, and I watched something close behind his eyes. A door shutting, slow and deliberate, the warmth pulling back like a tide going out.
“You should go home,” he said. “I need to stay.”
“I can stay too. I don’t mind waiting.”
“No. Go home, Andrea.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a wall going up, brick by brick, right in front of me.
I could feel the distance opening between us, his body angling away from my hand, his voice going flat, and there was nothing I could do about it because pushing him right now would be selfish and I knew it.
His mother was sick. He was scared. This wasn’t about me.
But it felt like it was about me. It felt like he was choosing to be alone instead of letting me help, choosing the wall over the hand I was holding out, and I didn’t know how to fight that without making everything worse.
I kissed his cheek. He didn’t lean into it. That absence of response hit harder than any words could have.
“Text me later,” I said. “Please.”
He nodded. I left. Walked to the elevator, pressed the button, stepped in without looking back because if I turned around I’d see his face, I’d stay, he told me to go, and I was trying to respect that even though every part of me was screaming that leaving him alone right now was wrong.
He didn’t text that night.
I lay in bed with my phone on the pillow, the screen bright in the dark room, waiting for a buzz that never came.
I checked it every twenty minutes until one in the morning, then put it face down and stared at the ceiling until I fell asleep sometime around three.
I texted him first thing: how is she? how are you?
call me. He didn’t respond. I called after lunch.
Voicemail, his recorded greeting, professional and clipped, nothing like the voice I was used to hearing against my ear in the dark.
Called again before dinner. Voicemail again.
I went to work the next day. His office was dark, empty, his chair pushed back from the desk like he’d left in a hurry days ago.
I sat at my desk staring at the glass wall with my stomach in knots.
Three days. Three days of silence, of voicemails he didn’t return, of texts marked read and unanswered.
I was sick with worry, literally sick, throwing up every morning before I could eat, my stomach rolling and cramping.
I told myself it was the stress, the anxiety, the not sleeping, the constant churning fear that something had broken between us in that hospital hallway.
Something I couldn’t fix because he wouldn’t let me close enough to try.
On the third night I sat on my bathroom floor with my forehead against the cool tile and my stomach empty and my phone dark on the counter above me. No texts, no calls, no voicemails, nothing. Just silence from the man who promised he’d tell me if something was wrong.
I pressed my palms flat against the floor, breathed, waited. I didn’t know what I was waiting for anymore.