Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 79328 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79328 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 397(@200wpm)___ 317(@250wpm)___ 264(@300wpm)
Miles’s car sat in the driveway. I parked beside it and walked to the front door. I rang the doorbell, hearing it echo inside the house. I tapped my foot, waiting impatiently.
Nothing. I knocked and rang the doorbell again, a couple of times. After a few minutes, a muffled thud came from somewhere in the house. I frowned, straining to listen, but the door didn’t open. I rang again, my finger pressing the button harder than necessary.
Just when real worry started settling in, the deadbolt clicked and the door swung inward.
My heart dropped to my stomach as soon as I saw my brother, dressed in sweatpants and a gray t-shirt. One look at Miles told me that something was seriously wrong. His brow was furrowed in confusion, his movements sluggish and uncoordinated. But it was his eyes that made my blood run cold.
His right pupil was blown wide, so dilated that the blackness had nearly swallowed his blue iris. Bright morning sunlight streamed directly into his face, but his eye wasn’t reacting or contracting at all.
“Raina?”
When he spoke, the stench of vomit hit me, sour and sharp. I forced myself not to recoil. Hazel mentioned that she thought he’d caught the flu, but this seemed more than that.
“Are you okay?” I stepped closer, pressing my palm to his forehead. No fever, but he was clearly, terrifyingly not okay.
He jerked back, wincing at my touch. His hand went to the back of his neck and he frowned at me. “What are you doing? Why are you here?”
The words came out on a mumble, and he stumbled to the side and caught himself on the doorframe. I watched his unsteady movements with mounting dread.
“Hazel asked me to check on you. She couldn’t reach you.”
More confusion clouded his features, like he couldn’t quite process my words. “Hazel?”
He was still rubbing his neck, his face tight with pain.
“Are you hurt?” I asked carefully.
“Just sore,” he muttered. “From the game.”
Saturday night. The hit. I’d watched him get slammed into the boards, his body crumpling onto the ice. He’d skated off under his own power, but what if his neck wasn’t the only thing that had taken the brunt of the impact? What if he’d hit his head harder than anyone realized?
What if this was more than a stomach bug?
“Come with me.” Making a spontaneous decision, I grabbed his arm, tugging him toward the door. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“What? Why?” He blinked at me slowly. “I’m fine.”
But he didn’t resist. Didn’t pull away. He let me guide him outside, and the fact that he wasn’t fighting me only sharpened my fear. The Miles I knew would have argued. Would have insisted he was fine, that I was overreacting.
He would have asserted himself, and this Miles just followed, docile and confused.
We’d almost reached my car when he stopped abruptly, wrenching his arm free of my grasp. I’d been pulling out my phone to text Simon, to let him know something had come up and I might be late, and the sudden jerking movement knocked the device from my grip.
The crack of glass when the phone hit the pavement made me curse. I snatched it up to find a spiderweb of fractures across the screen. The display flickered, unresponsive to my touch.
No. No, no, no.
But I didn’t have time to panic about that. Miles was bent over the lawn, retching into the grass, his entire body heaving. I shoved the useless phone into my purse and rushed to his side, rubbing his back until the spasms passed. Then I helped him into the passenger seat, buckled him in, and drove, breaking every speed limit between there and the hospital.
Miles rubbed his eyes the whole way, complaining about a headache, about the light being too bright, about feeling like his skull was splitting open. Each symptom confirmed what I already suspected, and my hands shook on the steering wheel.
Please let him be okay. Please.
The emergency room was a blur of fluorescent lights and antiseptic smell. They didn’t make Miles wait. One look at his dilated pupil and they rushed him through, a doctor shining a penlight in his eyes while firing off questions about his symptoms. Miles was too confused to answer coherently, so I filled in what I could. The hockey game, the hit against the boards, the delayed onset of nausea and disorientation.
They wheeled him away for a CT scan, and I was left alone in a cold waiting room with paperwork on a clipboard to fill out for him with shaking hands.
The paperwork blurred in front of me. I filled in what I knew, grateful that Miles had been here before and they already had his insurance information on file. His emergency contact was Hazel, and they must have called her, because she burst through the waiting room doors just as I handed the clipboard back to the nurse.