CHAPTER TWENTY #2
“Anne, please,” Dad interrupted. “Let her eat, because again, I’ll remind you, this has never happened before. I’m sure she had a good reason and knows better now.”
Mom paced while Dad settled me at the oversized island on a barstool. He slid me a napkin overflowing with my favorite lemon blueberry cookies.
Mom sighed but went to the fridge and fetched a glass of milk. “Here you go, dear.”
“Thank you, Mom.”
“Of course, but we are going to talk.” She gestured at me. “Robert, clearly she needs help, professional help, before it’s too late. Willa, I still have that number for the doctor I mentioned—”
Dad’s irritated exhale cut her off. Their relationship had been tainted for months.
Even despite their disagreement about the hours she worked, they’d never been so impatient with each other before…
before my coma. Dad provided a calming, levelheaded presence to Mom’s hyperattentive protective energy.
“Anne, we don’t have to treat her like a policy.
That’s why we’re her parents. It’s sort of our job to look at the bigger picture and adjust to the circumstances.
Nobody’s going to bat an eye if we don’t follow a set mold or twelve-point rubric or—or, hell, a damned flowchart that says, ‘If this, then this.’”
“But it we fail to set an example, then she gets the message that we’re condoning this sort of behavior.”
“This sort of behavior? Anne, she skipped school once and burst in bawling. Does that read like the actions of a slacking, apathetic teen on the path to destruction?”
I blinked, half of a cookie frozen in my mouth. There was the silver-tongue that made Off-Road Joe famous. He’d never used his power over words against Mom.
It threw her for a loop too.
“Mom? Dad?” Nick asked. “Are you getting a divorce?”
That halted them in their tracks.
Dad’s head dropped forward as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Willa, Nick, we’re sorry for fighting in front of you. It shouldn’t have happened. How about you two go up to your room?”
“No,” Mom protested. “Nick, you go ahead, but I have to be at the hospital in forty minutes, so we need to talk to Willa now.”
Dad frowned. “I thought you had the night off.”
“Clarence called in, and I—”
He laughed, a caustic, bitter sound. “Of course you volunteered. You know what, Willa? Go on up. I’ll be there in a minute.”
I glanced between them, feeling the fractures fill the room.
Mom said nothing, her green gaze fixed on Dad and her jaw clenched.
Nick stepped close enough that his arm brushed mine. Our hesitation kept our feet planted, as if our presence alone would derail them from these tracks thundering toward an even worse destination.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Because we can—” Dad’s look declined my offer before it took root.
“Right.” I nudged Nick, collected my backpack, and paused at the base of the stairs.
So much had happened today. The need to ask my mom why she would sign that waiver for some random FBI agent burned through me, but I feared it’d be the last straw for my dad.
Lacking that, I couldn’t bring anything else up without more brain capacity.
The days’ events crowded my thoughts like a knotted ball of yarn, and to untangle them would mean stretching it all out into the light of day—the bad, the worse, and the ugly.
Mom hung me out to dry, and I couldn’t explain why my day had been so awful without fearing they’d separate for good.
I rushed upstairs, collapsing on my bed and pulling the curtain closed on Nick’s questions. It was an awful thing to do, but I’d reached capacity. He eventually quieted, his bed’s springs announcing that he’d lain down as well.
Everything had scraped my insides away until only autonomous, jagged pieces of myself remained.
Too much. It was all too much.
I drifted off with my phone in my hand, waiting on it to charge enough to power up.
I shot upright, a gasp on my breath and visions of an old, haunted construction site dancing before me. For one horrifying moment, I thought I’d slept walked to that abandoned piece of property, and any minute, the police would storm the place, frog-marching me in handcuffs to a squad car.
Then, the graffitied structure faded from view.
I was home in bed.
The sun had set long ago, and shadows crowded in from the corners of Nick’s and my shared room. I held my breath, scanning them for anything lurking. After all, something had awakened me from my nightmare.
My attention went to the corner behind the door near our computer desk. I leaned forward, freezing as my brain sought patterns in the inky darkness.
Was that a human figure?
My heartbeat sped up. Had it moved?
Just when I decided that a person lurked there, the door flew open, flooding the room with blinding light from the hallway.
“There you are,” a familiar voice greeted. “Ready to join the land of the living?”
The innocent question froze me, burning away the vestiges of lingering drowsiness in a flash. The people from Vedault would be hard pressed to knock me unconscious after the spurt of energy the coincidental wording wrought.
At the loss of my night vision, I squinted to catch a look at the speaker, even though my brain had already processed and labeled the voice’s owner. The way he was backlit by the much brighter hallway didn’t afford many details. “Ralph? When did you get here?”
His bulky silhouette hesitated in the doorway. Scrambling, I clicked on the fairy lights strung through the slats of the bunk bed—a design choice I’d made since they paired so nicely with the decorative floral pillows.
The softer glow lit his apprehensive features.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He glanced around before shaking his head and crossing a few steps beyond the threshold. “Nothing major. But how are you? You had all of us worried sick.”
I’d left them hanging, again.
If they were furious, I couldn’t blame them. They didn’t know I’d been ghosted first—literally rather than figuratively—and that it left me drained.
But no, here was Ralph, looking worried.
I didn’t deserve them.
“I’m—” Fine, was what caught at the tip of my tongue. “Not that great. It’s been a long day.”
His brows lifted as he leaned his shoulder against Nick’s bunk and crossed his arms. “Wow, I don’t know if you’ve ever admitted that before, even when we were cuffed together in the back of a cop car for trespassing.”
Voices rose from below.
“Are the others here?” I asked.
They sort of appeared as packaged deals these days.
“Yeah. Do you think you’re up for joining us? Your dad cooked chili.”
My stomach decided for me. I neglected to eat anything, having been in such a rush to get home from Manuel’s. It released an ungodly growl like it wanted to eat its way out.
He laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.”