Epilogue
ADDIE
Isilenced the ring on my phone for the second time in the last five minutes, anxiety prickling at the back of my mind. Adam rarely called outside of our chats on Sundays.
Two calls in five minutes? Practically unheard of.
I needed to answer and make sure nothing was wrong, but I worked as a teacher’s assistant and my class was about to start their exam.
Their disgruntled attitude over being here on a game day Saturday had already irked me.
I didn’t want to deal with their complaints if I paused to take a personal call.
“You have ninety minutes.”
Exam booklets flipped open and pencils began scratching against paper. I pulled my phone out of my bag. The notifications for the missed calls and a voicemail appeared on my screen. I subtly aimed the camera at my face to unlock the phone and pulled up the transcript for Adam’s voicemail.
The device slipped from my fingers and crashed to the floor.
Thirty heads popped up from their desks in unison.
I cringed, whisper-shouting my apology as I bent down to pick up my phone. “Sorry!”
The “bro” in the third row, who’d been particularly vexed by his required presence at the exam, glared at me as if I had written the syllabus. I held his gaze, wholly unbothered by his attitude. As expected, his eyes dropped.
With the volume on my phone turned down, I pulled up the voicemail and pressed the phone to my ear.
Adam’s voice came through—panicked and rushed.
The overlapping chatter of students nearly drowned him out. But I made out what he said as if he’d been standing right in front of me.
“Addie. There’s been an accident. You need to get to the hospital. I can’t get there and…Addie. It’s Blake.”
Those two words echoed in my head long after the voicemail ended.
It’s Blake.
Blake Hawthorne, my brother’s lifelong best friend, who’d practically grown up in my childhood home.
Blake Hawthorne, whose popularity in the NFL had gone to his already inflated head, the source of my heartbreak countless times, and the man I’d barely seen or spoken to over the last three years. Ever since—
Blake Hawthorne, the boy I’d loved my entire life despite all of that.
Within the next five minutes, I had a teacher from a nearby room watching over my class until a replacement arrived.
Fifteen minutes later, I made it across campus to D'Arthur University Teaching Hospital. I pushed through the main doors, giving Blake’s name at the information desk and following the directions to his floor.
I picked up the phone outside the unit’s double doors, waiting as it connected me to the nurse’s station inside. When someone answered, I told them who I was here to see.
“Are you family?”
No matter how our lives had changed since college, Blake had always been my family. He always would be. Our history and futures were bound as if tied together by invisible string.
“Yes,” I blurted. “I’m his family.”
Although slightly panicked, it was the truth. He remained as much my family as Adam.
Even if, like paper dolls, our joined hands had ripped apart after years of me holding on to him so tightly. Even if I barely called him a friend now.
I’d torn us apart, but we still showed up for each other.
That was what we did.
So, when the nurse on the phone asked, “Your relationship to the patient?”
The answer left my mouth without a second thought.
“He’s my husband.”