The sound that came out of me was not a word. It was something older than language, something pulled from the same place that makes animals howl when they find their young in danger. I dropped to my knees beside him. My hands found his chest – fingers spread, pressing, searching for the thing I needed to feel more than I’d ever needed to feel anything.
There. Faint. Irregular. But there. His heart, still beating, still working, still fighting whatever war his lungs had declared against him.
“He’s alive,” I whispered. Or sobbed. The distinction had ceased to matter.
Sable was in the doorway, one hand pressed over her mouth, tears already falling. But she didn’t freeze. She didn’t collapse. She snapped.
“Hospital. Now. Get his arms.”
We lifted him between us. He was heavier than he looked – my brother, who’d stopped eating properly months ago, who’d gotten thinner while I wasn’t watching – and the dead weight of his unconscious body was a physical argument I couldn’t counter. We carried him down the stairs, through the front door, across the driveway. Sable opened the rear door, and I climbed in first, and we lowered him until his head rested in my lap.
His blood was on my hands. On the high school t-shirt. On the sweatpants with the hole in the knee. I looked down at his face – gray, slack, impossibly young without consciousness to age it – and I held him the way I imagined our mother held him when he was born, and I said his name over and over, as if repetition could function as medicine, as if love could be administered through sound.
Sable drove. Faster than before. Faster than safe. The hospital appeared in the windshield like a beacon – white and bright and humming with the specific energy of a place where people come to be saved.
We pulled up. Screamed for help. Nurses materialized – practiced, efficient, moving with the calm urgency of people trained to respond to exactly this. A stretcher appeared. Hands reached for Rowan. I didn’t want to let go. Every fiber of my body resisted the separation, as though releasing him meant admitting he was beyond my ability to help, and admitting that meant admitting something I could not, would not, survive.
They took him. Through swinging doors, down a corridor, into the bright, sterile interior of a building designed to fight the thing that was killing my brother.
I stood in the lobby. My hands were red. My shirt was red. My face was wet. I was shaking in a way that came from somewhere deeper than muscles – from the marrow, from the foundation.
Sable guided me to the reception desk. A young nurse looked up, her professional calm slightly dented by the sight of us – two women, one covered in blood, both crying.
“My brother,” I managed. “Rowan Austin. He was just brought in.”
The nurse typed. Scrolled. Looked up with an expression that didn’t match the emergency.
“Everything’s been taken care of,” she said. “All payments, all documentation – it’s handled.”
I blinked. “What?”
“The treatment has been fully paid for. All the legal documents are in order.”
“I didn’t-” My brain, already overloaded, struggled to process this new data. “I didn’t pay for anything. I just got here.”
The nurse offered a small, knowing smile. “Are you Marlowe? His sister?”
“Yes.”
She pointed across the lobby. “The gentleman who arranged everything is over there.”
I turned.
A man stood with his back to us, near the water fountain. White t-shirt. Black jeans. A cap pulled low over his hair. Something about his posture – the particular set of his shoulders, the angle of his head – tripped a wire in my memory, and the recognition arrived not as a thought but as a physical sensation: my stomach dropping, my fists clenching, my whole body recalibrating from grief to a fury so pure it felt almost holy.
I walked toward him. My sneakers squeaked on the hospital floor. Sable was saying something behind me – a question, a warning – but it didn’t reach me. Nothing reached me except the closing distance between my body and his.
I tapped his shoulder.
He turned.
Sterling.
That face. That smug, handsome, devastatingly punchable face, arranged into an expression of practiced tenderness that I recognized the way you recognize a con artist’s best trick – too late to avoid it, just in time to hate it.
“Marlowe.” His voice dripped with manufactured warmth. “I knew you’d come.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.