Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-six
RACHEL
Four years ago
Losing Josh
“Rhett.” The name shatters out of me, my throat clawing around the syllables.
Silent sobs rip through my chest. My phone slips from my fingers, clattering to the floor, but it might as well have vanished into another world.
Sound no longer exists. Only panic. Only the crushing weight inside my ribs that won’t let me inhale.
I’m gone. Completely untethered. I’m watching myself from somewhere above, hovering. My body is a stranger. It is rigid, trembling, and drowning in silence. I see Rhett, too, from where I’m at. His face, his arms, his chest. It’s all right there, but I can’t move. I can’t reach him.
“Sunny, what?” His voice tears through the fog, urgently scraping against me.
His eyes dart across my face, wild and desperate, searching for something, anything, to hold on to.
But I can’t give him anything. There is nothing left.
His hands find my arms, shaking gently at first. But my limbs are useless.
Dead weight. I can’t breathe. I can’t move.
I can’t make myself come back. I don’t want to come back.
“Sunny, what the fuck is wrong? You have to say something. You have to say something. Please—say anything!” He doesn’t let go.
His hands climb my arms until they frame my face.
His fingers press into my cheeks, forcing my eyes up to his.
And in those deep brown eyes, I see me—broken, lost, a storm of fear reflected back at me.
“Breathe, Sunny. You have to breathe. Please, you have to breathe. Look at me. Why aren’t you breathing?” His voice is desperate.
He pulls me against him. Chest to chest he swings his arms around me, holding me so tightly I can feel every beat of him as though it’s the rhythm of the world itself.
The pressure pins the panic just enough, and finally—finally—I can inhale.
One shaky, jagged breath. Then another. My sobs erupt, uncontrollable, tearing through me.
And he doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t step back. He buries his face against my hair, murmuring over and over: “You’re okay. You’re safe. You’re safe. Hear me? You are safe.”
His voice is steady, but his heartbeat beneath my cheek is a storm, hammering through his ribs. He is holding me upright, keeping me tethered. Without him, I’d already be on the floor. I’m sure of it.
“We have to go.” My voice is a ghost, barely audible. “We have to go to the hospital.”
He jerks back just enough to see my face. “What? Why, Sunny, why do we have to go to the hospital?”
The words claw at my throat but won’t come out clean. “He’s hit. He’s dead. I think—oh my God, I think he’s going to be dead. Rhett, what if he’s dead?”
His face crumples. But then the expression is gone. He buries it so deep I almost doubt I saw it.
“Who, Sunny?” His voice cracks, but he forces it steady, begging me now. “Come on, please use your words. I need you to tell me what’s happening.”
“Josh.” The name rips out of me, and I’m pretty sure it is tearing my chest in two. “Josh and Margo. They were in a car accident. They—they told me Margo’s okay, but they—” My throat seizes. I can’t finish. I don’t want to finish. “They wouldn’t tell me about Josh. They… they wouldn’t, Rhett.”
I drag my eyes up to his.
I see it hit him. A flicker of devastation, so sharp it steals his breath this time. But then it’s gone again. He swallows it, all of it, and what’s left is only me, unraveling in his arms.
“What if he’s dead?” I whisper, the words tasting like blood in my mouth.
His arms tighten around me, unyielding, shielding me from the truth with nothing but his body. But I feel it. I know. He is scared, too.
The next five hours are the worst hours of my entire life.
I don’t know if I’m still on Earth. The rules feel different here.
Like gravity shifted when no one was looking, and I slipped sideways into something darker, heavier.
This place isn’t a hospital. Hospitals imply healing, exits, a version of the future that still exists. None of which are true here.
This—no this is hell. My hell. A private one, tailored down to the smallest detail, where time stretches and snaps, and I’m trapped inside the worst moment of my life on a continuous loop.
I’m not sure what is worse. Watching my mother disintegrate right in front of me, her body shrinking into itself, her face hollowing until I barely recognized the woman who raised me. Or hearing Margo beg God to take her too.
Her voice didn’t sound like her own. It cracked open on that plea, raw and desperate and stripped of pride. She didn’t scream. There wasn’t any rage. She just asked quietly, like she was already halfway gone. Like if God was listening at all, He’d know exactly how serious she was.
“Sunny, let’s go,” Rhett whispers. His voice is low. I think he is afraid the wrong volume might shatter what’s left of me. “We should get you home. You need rest.”
The only thing I need is my big brother.
“I’m not leaving without him.” The words tear out of my throat. “I’m not—”
I break apart before I can finish. The tears come again, hot and relentless, spilling faster than I can breathe through them. I thought there had to be a limit. A point where the body shuts down, runs dry, protects itself.
Turns out there isn’t. Grief is renewable. Bottomless.
I am drowning in it, a living fountain of saltwater and heartbreak, while my brother—my best friend—is reduced to a still shape on a sterile table. Motionless. Final.
How is that possible? How does the world keep moving when he doesn’t?
How does oxygen still exist when his lungs no longer draw it in?
I don’t understand what comes next for me.
I had never had a before Josh. There was just Josh.
Everywhere. Constant. And now there is after Josh.
And it’s a place I don’t want to exist in.
Rhett doesn’t argue. He looks at me and in that look, I see it.
The same devastation that’s hollowed me out has carved a home inside him, too.
Josh wasn’t just my brother. He was Rhett’s best friend.
His chosen family. The loss has ripped into him just as deep, just as cruel.
But here, he doesn’t fall apart. He swallows it.
Buries it somewhere deep and lethal and steps forward when I can’t.
Without a word, he bends and lifts me into his arms. My body offers no resistance. It feels like nothing. Like smoke. Like grief has stripped me of all weight and substance and purpose. I press my cheek to his chest. His heart is a violent thing beneath my ear, but still beating. Still alive.
It is the only thing anchoring me to this place, to this moment. I am in a world I no longer recognize, but haven’t been allowed to leave.
Rhett shouldn’t be driving. The thought screams inside me.
We should never get into another car again.
Cars kill. Cars twist metal and bodies and futures.
They steal. They stole Josh. And if the universe has any appetite left for cruelty, they’ll steal Rhett too.
The fear coils tight in my chest, but I don’t fight him.
I can’t. There’s nothing left to push with.
That light inside me—the one that used to flare when Josh teased me, when Rhett looked at me for half a second too long—it is gone. Snuffed out as if it never mattered. Like it was never meant to last.
So I let him.
I let Rhett carry me through the sliding hospital doors, past the antiseptic air and the humming lights, out into a night that feels wrong in its quiet.
I let him lower me into his car with unbearable care, as if I’m something fragile and precious, even though we both know I’m already broken beyond repair. There are only shards of the person I was left.
I don’t look back as he closes the door, thinking leaving the hospital will mean leaving my hellscape behind. But only once it disappears in the rearview mirror do I realize—being alive while my brother is dead is my true hellscape.
I have no other choice than to let him drive.
Away from the hospital. Away from the last place I will ever see my brother. Away from my Josh.
I let Rhett take me home.