“C-can we have some more time?” Mom started to cry again, and I didn’t know what to do except keep holding onto her.
The nurse looked genuinely sad. I wondered how many times she’d had this conversation.
Becky stepped forward.
“I am so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Hallman. Why don’t you and I sit down and have a little talk?”
“We’ll get you some coffee,” Kayla said, getting up from her chair and giving Adam a look. He nodded and left the room. She was about to try and take me too, but Mom stopped both of us.
“I’m not leaving him!” she shrieked and the sound shattered the eerie calm. “I’m not leaving him!” She fell next to the bed, letting go of me and reaching for Dad’s hand. “I can’t leave him,” she said, holding his hand in both of hers.
“You can’t leave me,” she whispered, and I knew she was speaking to him. “How dare you leave me?”
“Why don’t we give her a minute,” the nurse said, putting one hand on my shoulder and another on Kayla’s. I didn’t want to leave him, either, but I couldn’t be in the room anymore with Mom that way.
I still couldn’t cry. Everyone else had done a lot of it; even Adam had red eyes. With an iron grip, the nurse steered us out of the room as Mom sobbed and whispered to Dad and Becky rubbed her shoulder and tried to get her into a chair.
“Does this happen? A lot?” The words were sticky and hard to get out of my mouth.
“Yes,” she said, letting go of me. Kayla crushed me in a hug and started to cry.
“I’m so sorry you weren’t here,” she sobbed.
I didn’t have anything to say in response, so I just kept hugging her as she cried on my shoulder. Finally she let go and wiped her eyes.
“Did you drive up?”
“No, Stryker brought me.” I looked around and found him leaning against the wall about ten feet away. He was staring off into space and I watched him for a moment before his gaze slid to meet mine.
“Thank you,” Kayla said, letting me go and walking toward Stryker before putting her arms around him and hugging him tight. “Thank you so much.”
His arms hung limp for a moment, as if he didn’t know what to do. Then, hesitantly, he wrapped them around her waist and returned the hug.
When she let him go, he cleared his throat and looked at the floor.
I walked over to him and he looked up.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.” His voice was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. Adam came around the corner then, balancing several cups of steaming coffee.
“Here,” Kayla said, handing me one. Adam handed her a napkin and she blew her nose on it.
I should want to cry. When your dad suddenly died of a heart attack, you should want to cry. You should sob until you don’t have any tears left. I should be like Mom, or at least like Kayla. I shouldn’t feel like this was some sort of elaborate joke, and that any second someone was going to tell me this wasn’t real, and then I could go back to normal. I was still waiting.
Stryker watched me as if he was waiting, too.
I held out my hand and he looked down at it as if it was the first time he’d ever seen one. He looked back to my eyes and then took my hand, twisting and locking our fingers together.
“I’m so sorry, Katie.”
“Thanks,” I said, because that seemed like the thing to say. I sipped the coffee because that seemed like the thing to do and talked to Kayla about the ugly watercolor that hung in the hallway and pretended I couldn’t hear Mom sobbing and talking to Becky behind the door.
Kayla and Adam huddled together, talking quietly.
Stryker and I stood silent.
“I don’t know what to say. To make you feel better, or to make this somehow less of a shitty situation,” he finally said as I finished the last of my terrible coffee.
“You don’t have to say anything. I can’t even cry, so clearly you’re not the only one who doesn’t know what to do.”
“You can cry or not cry. You can do whatever you want to.”
I set the empty cup on the floor. I couldn’t be bothered to find a trash can at the moment. “I should cry. I’ve been trying to, but I can’t. How f**ked up is that?”
“Like I said, you can do whatever you want.” He pulled our linked hands to his lips and kissed the back of mine. It was a simple gesture, but it made me want to smile. If only I could figure out how to make my face do that.
“Can I do anything? Get you anything?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Unless you know how to travel back in time, no.” Was I joking? How could I be joking? To his credit, Stryker didn’t look shocked.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so desperately sorry for you. I wish there was something…fuck.” He took the hand that wasn’t linked with mine and banged it against the wall.
“My dad died. There’s nothing you could do.” I said it again, in my head.
My dad died. My dad died.
Three words. A bunch of letters strung together in such an order that they meant my dad was dead. He was dead. As in gone, lost, far away, never coming back.
My dad died.
“Oh my God. My dad died.”
I said it a few more times and Stryker looked like he wanted to put my hand over my mouth so I’d stop saying it.
“He’s dead,” I said, looking at Stryker. “He’s dead.”
There they were. Tears.
Like I’d somehow tapped into a hidden well, they started pouring out of me. A sound tore from my mouth, and I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. I started to fall, but Stryker caught me again, yanking me into his arms, whether to comfort me or stifle the noise, I wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter because my dad was dead.
Kayla’s arms came around my back and I was in a hug sandwich, but it didn’t matter because my dad was dead.
And then I didn’t remember anything because my dad was dead.
Chapter Nineteen
Stryker
I’d been waiting for her to break, or do something, and finally, she did. That was almost worse than the shock, because at least with that, I could still sort of reach her. When the grief and reality finally consumed her, there was no reaching her.
I tried to hand her off to Kayla, but she wouldn’t let go of me, so we both sort of held her while she cried and made that sound I’d heard earlier.
Someone must have called another grief counselor, because a second woman in a crisp black jacket and skirt showed up and tried to usher us down the hall to a room where Katie’s crying wouldn’t disturb the rest of the hospital.
She wouldn’t walk, despite our coaxing, so I just picked her up like I had before and carried her into a room that looked like some sort of playroom with lots of plastic toys in a bin and ducks on the wall and plush couches for sinking into. I tried to set her down, but I had to sit with her, so she ended up on my lap, like a child.
I stroked her hair and whispered things in her ear and the grief counselor tried to get her to talk, and finally made the decision that they had to give Katie a sedative.
They took her to an empty room down the hall from Mr. Hallman’s and she fought a little before they gave it to her.
“Hey, it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.” I said it over and over, even though neither of us believed it.
Soon, her eyes were drooping closed and her grip on me loosened. When the artificial sleep finally claimed her I sat back on the bed she was in and looked at Kayla.
“She didn’t cry at all on the way down. She kept saying that she couldn’t and she wanted to.” I pushed Katie’s hair back so it wasn’t in her face.
“I should go check on mom,” Kayla said, looking out the door. We hadn’t heard anything from the room down the hall in a while.
“Go, it’s okay. I’ll stay with her. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Thank you,” Kayla said again before leaving the room. I went back to watching Katie, making sure her breathing was deep and even.
Adam sat down in one of the chairs and stretched his arms over his head.
“I feel like I should know what to do by now, having lost my mom and all my grandparents, but every time I think of something to do or say, it seems wrong,” he said.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I nodded and adjusted Katie’s head on the pillow. Her face was calm, as if she’d fallen asleep naturally.
“Kayla’s trying to keep it together, but it won’t last forever. Eventually it catches up with you. Just takes some people longer than others.”
Katie’s eyebrows twitched and then went still.
“I have no idea what to do. I’ve never lost anybody I cared about. Not like this. I’m not exactly close with my family.” I wasn’t sure how much he knew.
“Yeah, Kayla said you’d had a hard time, but the truth is, nothing can prepare you for something like this. There’s no manual or training course. You just have to hold on and not let it take you away.”
I hoped it wouldn’t take Katie away. She was already so broken. It was too much for one person to handle.
“Are you going to be okay? I know we just met, but we’re sort of in the same boat here.” He had a point.
“I have no idea. I just want to be okay for her.” He nodded. Adam understood.
What he didn’t understand was that I’d been on the brink of telling Katie about sleeping with Ric. I’d been about to hurt her again, and then something even bigger swooped in and did it for me.
How could I tell her now? But how could I leave her in the dark? Every time she looked at me with such hope, it killed me. I wasn’t the guy she thought I was. I wasn’t the guy she needed me to be.
She shifted in her sleep, turning toward me, and I knew that I couldn’t tell her anytime soon. Right now I had to be there for her and I’d figure out the rest later.
***
Katie woke up a few hours later, after Mrs. Hallman had sort of calmed down. She’d moved from hysterical to a state like Katie was in earlier. Eerie detachment.
Kayla ended up stepping in and helping with the arrangements, that his wish was to be cremated. She and the first grief counselor, Becky, talked and talked as Mrs. Hallman sat and nodded when they asked her a question. Katie was still groggy, so I kept her in my arms.
Her phone went off and I realized that no one knew where we were. In all the chaos, neither of us had thought to tell Lottie, or anyone else, where we’d gone. I pulled out Katie’s phone to find about a million frantic, all-caps text messages and a number of voicemails.
I didn’t want to leave Katie, but I had to do something, so I texted Lottie, Trish, Will, Simon, Zan and Audrey what had happened. This was not the kind of thing you sent in a text message, but I couldn’t really make a call.
They messaged back, and I tried to answer them as best I could, saying that I would call later with more details.
Talking, talking, talking. So much talking.
And then it was time to leave. Just like that.
I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do, so I just got Katie to her feet and waited for someone to tell me.