MAC
My eyes blink open and the glare from the open window hits. I quickly shut them and turn my head on the pillow of my hospital bed. My body hurts but my heart is in agony.
“Mitch?” I ask, my eyes still closed and my voice rusty from disuse.
Someone will answer. In the seventy-two hours since I’ve been in hospital, there’s always been at least one person by my bedside. Jake has barely left at all. I wish they would all go. Him too. I need … I don’t know what I need. Space to reflect on what I did? Time? A rewind so I can go back and change the past? How far would I go back if I could do that? A few days? A year? Two? Or would I go back to the very start, before I met Jake?
Someone answers, but I’m so lost in thought I don’t hear it. “What?”
My hand is squeezed. “He’s still in a coma.”
The voice comes from Jared, but further away. He’s not the one holding my hand. I nod to indicate I heard. The gentle motion causes my head to throb, and I wince. My eldest brother hasn’t woken. The loss of blood and a stroke brought on by the injury put his body in distress. And if he knows, deep down inside his soul that Gabriella is gone, I fear he’ll never wake. “I want to see him.”
Now. Not so I can beg for forgiveness. Asking for that is too much. I just want to apologise while he’s still alive. I need him to hear me say I’m sorry.
“No.” That was Jake, his refusal spoken in a firm tone. He’s close. Right by my bed. My hand is squeezed again and his voice gentles. “You’re not well enough.”
“I want to see him,” I repeat, stubborn.
“Mac—”
“Don’t.” My eyes flare open, hardening on Jake. Half his face is red and purple, the skin tender and swollen. There’s a stitched cut above his brow and a split lip he keeps busting open. It’s bleeding again. His eye socket didn’t require surgery but it’s bandaged and the doctors are keeping a close watch on it. I know this because Evie told me. When I asked Jake he simply said he was ‘fine.’
“Maybe later in the week,” he says softly.
I close my eyes again and turn my head away. I hate looking at him. There’s too much kindness. Too much empathy and compassion. Too much goddamn heart.
I don’t deserve any of it.
“Please go away,” I whisper.
“I can’t do that,” Jake replies. He untangles his hand from mine. The action gives me relief. I don’t want to be soothed. Except it shifts further down; his warm palm comes to rest on my belly and spreads love through the warmth of his touch. Our baby is in there and she’s thriving. Yes it’s a girl, which is not an official verdict because I’m only fourteen weeks along, but I just know. It’s mother’s instinct.
“Of course she’s thriving,” my dad had muttered in his big old gruff voice when I told him. “She’s a Valentine.”
Can you believe it? My dad was taking credit for my little girl’s kickass determination to survive. Bullshit. Her grit is all me and Jake. “She’s a Romero,” I retorted stubbornly.
Dad paled but he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Yeah. She’s that too.”
To say my parents were thrilled with the baby announcement (inadvertently finding out thanks to my mouthy doctor who thought everyone knew) was to say the earth is round. If Mum had been a gymnast, she would have done a few celebratory backward tumbles with an added somersault for extra effect. Instead, her eyes turned glassy and her hands clutched mine.
“My baby is having a baby,” she blubbered while Dad rubbed her back and made gruff, soothing noises to both of us.
“Mum,” I muttered, embarrassed at the emotional display and warmed by it at the same time. The best part about my mother is that she would have reacted the same way when I was seventeen.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted out.
“For what?” she asked.
“For running away.”
Mum shook her head and looked to Dad. They shared a glance that spoke a thousand words, but only to each other. Then she turned to me. “It was a long time ago. And we weren’t fair. We—”
Dad put his hand on Mum’s shoulder and squeezed. She stopped talking.
“There’s something you need to know,” he said. “But right now isn’t the time.”
“How’s our baby doing?” Jake’s question interrupts my memory.
“She’s fine.” My voice is croaky. I clear my throat. “She’s better than fine.”
“I’ll be back later,” Jared says in a low voice with a heavy sigh.
My hospital room door opens and shuts and silence returns. It’s painful. I feel like I don’t know how to be myself anymore. Everything has changed.
“Talk to me, Princess. Please.”
There’s nothing to talk about. The adrenaline that fuelled my anger over him leaving is gone. Now there’s so much pain, and I don’t like it. It feels irreparable. My eyes prickle. I squeeze them closed more tightly but a tear breaks free. It drops to my pillow with a plop. Jake doesn’t see because my face is turned away from him. “Please go,” I whisper.
“Can I get you a drink?”
Goddamn dogged bastard. I turn back his way. Leaning up on one elbow, I reach for the plastic cup of water from my hospital side table and crunch it in my hand. Then I toss it at the wall. It makes a minimal impact before dropping to the linoleum with a pathetic crackle. “No. I don’t want a fucking drink.”
I slouch back down on the bed and face the other way. That was uncalled for. I’m being a bitch but toning it down feels impossible right now. “Why don’t you just leave like you tried to do before.”
“You don’t want me to go. You came after me.”
“Only so I could rip your head off for leaving and throw it to the sharks in Sydney Harbour,” I mutter bitterly.
Jake huffs with slight amusement. It’s a relieved sound.
I turn my head. “That makes you happy?”
“To hear you sounding more like yourself? Yes. I’d rather you mad at me than feel nothing at all.”
But I’m more mad at myself. And I don’t know how to get him to leave. “I’m tired.”
“Sleep, then,” he replies. “I’ll be here.”
My lips pinch.
“I’m not going anywhere, Princess. Not ever again.”
I ignore the burgeoning sense of peace his words bring me and turn my head to look at the stubborn man. “Fine. Then I’m hungry.”
“Lunch will be served soon.”
“I don’t want to wait,” I retort. “I’m hungry now.”
“Mac—”
I bring out my ace in the hole. “It’s not good for the baby if I don’t eat.”
Jake swipes at the side of his face that isn’t swollen, uncertainty in his expression. “Okay,” he says slowly. “How about I go and get you something from the cafeteria?”
“Perfect.” I force my lips to curve slightly. It feels off, but he takes it in and nods his head.
He rises to his feet and moves his hand from my belly, leaving coldness in its wake. “I’ll be back, okay?”
Jake leans down and presses a warm kiss to my lips. Flutters fill my stomach, and I find myself responding. He draws back and runs his hand over my hair in an affectionate parting gesture before he walks to the door. He opens it with a backward glance before leaving. The door closes with a soft click.
Finally.
I’m alone.
I grab for the buzzer by the side of my bed. My thumb hits the button incessantly. I don’t stop until the door flings open, and my worst nightmare enters the room.
Oh fuck.
Houlihan strides in. Soundless nursing shoes somehow manage to slap against the linoleum floor. Her eyebrows are drawn on extra squiggly today, indicating a harried and annoyed appearance. She’s having a bad day, and she’s clearly prepared for me to make it worse.
I don’t disappoint. “I need a wheelchair. STAT.”
“You think I’m your errand girl?” Her voice is gravel like a pack a day chain smoker. Houlihan moves to the front end of my bed, where my chart rests in a plastic pocket fixed on the wall. She picks it up in her meaty hands and examines it with pinched lips. She returns the chart to its little slot and her eyes narrow on mine. “You’re not going anywhere.”
My nostrils flare wide. Bitch. “I have a brother in a coma. On fucking life support. You can bet your ass I’m going to get a wheelchair so I can see him or I’ll pitch a tantrum so big and loud you’ll hear it from the International Space Station.”
Her lips pinch harder, but I see her brain ticking over. “Mitchell Valentine?”
My hand snaps out and grabs her wrist, a reflexive action that halts her in place. “You know him?”
After a pause where Houlihan looks at my hand (it’s digging into her skin, but I can’t seem to let go) and then looks at me, she speaks. “He’s on level nine, ward six B, room nine oh two.”
My eyes literally tear up with gratitude. For Houlihan no less. I blame it on baby hormones. I clear my throat and peel my hand from her wrist, finger by finger. “Thank you.”
She leaves and moments later returns with a wheelchair. My eyes round with surprise. “Threaten me again and I’ll tear you a new one,” she says in her crotchety voice, belying the kindness of her actions. There’s no time to respond. Jake will return at any moment. At least with Houlihan seemingly in my corner I now have a fighting chance.
After parking the contraption by the side of my bed, she helps me out. I hiss when I put pressure on my right thigh where the wound is stitched and healing. That sonofabitch Ross. Poor Jake is busy worrying about my soul for shooting him. I’m just trying to work out how I can get my hands on his cold, lifeless corpse so I can shoot him all over again. Sorry, Jake, but my soul is doing cartwheels over the death of that asshole.
“Don’t put pressure on it,” Houlihan snaps.
“I’m not,” I bark back at her and reach across for my phone.
We bicker the entire trip from my room up to level nine. I’m almost grateful. Almost. Because it distracts me from what I have to do. She wheels me through ward six B and toward room nine oh two. My hands white-knuckle the arm rests. I’m pushed through the door and toward Mitch’s bed.
Houlihan sets the brake. “I’ll find someone else to bring you back down. Some of us have real work to do.”
I ignore her parting jibe as I stare at my eldest brother. His skin blends in with the white bed sheets he lies in, and thick bandages wrap around his neck, extending to underneath his right armpit. Deep, dark bruises rest under his eyes, and a ventilator helps him breathe. He’s deathly still, not even a twitch to provide the slightest hope.
My eyes prickle and I bring a hand to my mouth, emotion hitting me hard enough to steal my breath. Mitch has always been there for me. Always.
I reach across and take his hand. It feels so lifeless in mine. I close my eyes and see him glaring across the dinner table at me. “You can’t wear that dress. Ever.”
He was the one who orchestrated my return from Melbourne, his eyes burning with the wrath of a thousand suns after I ran away. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”
“You should have, Stitch,” I whisper, swallowing the ache as my eyes crack open, alighting on his prone form. “Because look what I did.”
Then there was that time he promised to buy me a new dress after spilling wine on the one I wore to our family dinner. “You can’t buy forgiveness,” I told him, lashing out.
A sob escapes my throat.
“I’m sorry I interfered in your life,” he’d told me. “We all did. You’re our little sister. No matter how strong or capable you may be, it’s our instinct to protect you.”
“And look where that got you, you great big asshead!” I rail at him, my voice rising along with my anger. I want to stand up and punch him for doing what he did. For using Jake as bait and not telling me. For coming in after me. For being the best brother a sister could ever ask for.
Instead, I push up out of my wheelchair, putting pressure on my good leg, and I lean across and hug him. My cheek rests on his chest as tears pour down my face. “I’m sorry.” My voice cracks. “I’m so sorry.”
After taking a deep breath, I hobble backward and stumble into my chair. I’m exhausted and drained, and I need to get out of here. Not just this room. The whole hospital. I can’t breathe.
I get on my phone and summon an Uber.
JAKE
It pains me to return holding nothing but a dried-out looking ham and cheese sandwich. Mac eats a lot of rubbish. A shitload, really. There’s not an hour of the day that goes by when she’s not jamming something in her mouth. A burger, fries, Evie’s lemon slice, Quinn’s peanut butter and white chocolate chip cookies, and those damn redskin lollies that get stuck in her teeth and will likely cause cavities.
You would think her the size of a house with the calories she consumes each day, but her fury burns them faster than a lit match. Even so, she needs to be healthier, especially with a baby on the way. This sandwich isn’t really the epitome of wholesome food. Maybe I should get some advice from Jared.
I push open her hospital room door and find the bed empty.
Goddammit.
I turn around and head straight for the elevator. After jabbing the up button, I stand and wait. Eventually the doors ding loudly and zip open, expelling Travis, Jared, and Evie, the latter slurping her way through a chocolate thickshake. Surely that drink is full of preservatives. There’s no way in hell Mac will be ingesting any of the like during her pregnancy.
“She’s not here,” I tell them, putting my arm across the doorway of the elevator to keep it open.
They halt en masse as I step inside and turn.
“Where is she?” Travis asks.
I point up, indicating she’s visiting Mitch. They all step back in, and I press nine. The doors close and the elevator ascends.
Jared reclines against the side wall, hands in his pockets and a scowl on his face. It’s directed at me.
“What?”
His voice is accusatory. “You let her out of bed.”
My lips peel back in a sarcastic smile. “Oh, that’s cute. You think when I told Mac she couldn’t get out of bed and visit Mitch that she’d actually listen.”
“You shouldn’t have left her alone.”
My eyes narrow. “She was hungry, Valentine.” I wave the offensive looking sandwich in his face. “Was I supposed to let her starve?”
“Enough!” Travis shouts. His face is pained. “We’re all stressed and upset right now. Let’s not take it out on each other.”
“He started it,” I mutter, which basically makes me an immature dick.
“You’re a dick,” Jared retorts, verbalising the obvious.
Travis shakes his head. “I can’t believe you two fuckers are going to be dads. God help us all.”
Evie unwraps her lips from the straw. “Amen,” she adds.
Eventually we arrive at Mitch’s room. Mac isn’t there. Panic climbs my throat. It feels like heartburn. I rub at my chest.
“Maybe she was going back down as we were coming up?” Evie suggests.
Panic recedes. “You’re right. You all stay here and I’ll go back down.”
I leave them and race back down to Mac’s room, but she hasn’t returned. I’m standing beside her bed when my phone rings. I tug it free from the back pocket of my jeans. After checking who the incoming call is from, I hit the red decline button.
It rings again.
I decline again.
It rings again.
I huff and answer it, putting the phone to my ear. “Jake Romero.”
“Sorry to bother you.”
“It’s fine, but I’m just in the middle of something. Can I call back later?”
“No. I was told to tell you it’s urgent.”
I swipe a hand down the side of my face. I can’t deal with this right now. “How urgent is urgent because—”
“It’s urgent, Mr. Romero.”
A heavy, frustrated sigh escapes me. They wouldn’t tell me it was if it wasn’t. “I’ll be right there.”
I send a message to Travis. She’s not here. You need to search the hospital. Get security to check the tapes. It might seem an excessive step, but this is Mac we’re talking about.
It takes me forty-five minutes to reach my destination. It usually takes me half an hour, but I have fractured ribs and questionable vision. I rush past reception instead of taking the time to sign the visitor registration log like I usually do. After walking through a maze of turns and corridors, I go through another door which takes me outdoors and along a meandering road. From here there are buggies that can take you to your destination, but I choose to walk quickly. It’s not far.
When I reach villa number five oh nine, I open the door with my key and step inside. My father is on his daybed in the living area. It’s set on an incline so he’s half sitting in front of a window where he can view the gardens that sprawl outward.
When I see Mac beside him, my knees almost buckle with relief. What is she doing here? I had no idea she even knew where my father lived. She’s lying in the expensive recliner I bought after getting the shits over the crappy chairs the assisted living facility provided. She has the leg rest up and the back shoved down.
My father’s eyes are a little glassy as they watch her rather than the window, and it’s then that I realise she’s talking.
“And then I told him I only came after him so I could rip off his head and feed it to the sharks.”
Dad makes a garbled noise. It’s the sound of him laughing and I wonder if Mac realises that. I want to tell her so she understands his response, but I want to keep listening too. I let it go and stand by the door, remaining unobtrusive and quiet.
“It’s not funny, Mike,” she replies and my brows pull down, puzzled. She knew it was him laughing. The only way she could have known was if she’d spent considerable time with him since his aneurysm. “He was going to leave. I should’ve shot him instead of Ross.”
Dad’s garbled sounds grow louder. She’s making him laugh hard. A lump forms in my throat. Then he speaks. “Maaart knooooorrrk sense.”
After years of listening to him talk, I know what he’s saying, but Mac—
She snorts, understanding him perfectly. “Nothing will knock sense into that hard head of his.”
Dad garbles again.
Oh god, my fucking heart.
“Did you know we’re supposed to be engaged?”
He jerks in surprise. I haven’t told him.
“He wants me to take his name. Can you imagine that? Me? A Romero.”
“Pr … Pr-prooooud,” Dad gets out.
He’s trying to tell her that nothing would make him prouder than Mac being a Romero. “You’ll be my father-in-law, Mike. And a grandpa.”
He jerks harder at the second revelation.
Mac pats her belly. “Will you come to the hospital when she’s born? My dad can come get you.”
“L-l-looove,” he answers.
I inhale a shaky breath and my eyes burn.
“M-m-mmmm Miiiiitch,” he gets out, “be gord unc unc … uncle.”
Mac’s jaw tightens and her voice chokes. “I don’t know how I’ll live with myself if he doesn’t wake up.”
I go to step in, but Dad moves a shaky hand toward her. It flops down on top of hers in an awkward attempt at comfort. “T-t tttime. Jake. B-b bbbabyy.”
He’s telling her that she’ll forgive herself in time. That I’ll be there for her. And that she needs to think of the baby.
“I told him to get out,” she tells him. “I wanted to see Mitch. I wanted space but now …”
“N-now?” Dad prompts.
“I just want Jake,” she whispers. “I blame him for leaving, but I pushed him to do it. We lost a baby once. A long time ago. I was in a car accident. Jake didn’t know. I thought he did, but he didn’t, and I was so angry at him for not being there. I lost him that day too and it felt like I died. It took me two years to remember how to live again. And ever since, all I could think was that I never wanted to go through that again. I was scared. But that’s stupid, right? Because I’m a Valentine. We don’t get scared. But I was. I still am. And I panicked when I found out I was pregnant again and Jake had gone. So panicked I couldn’t think straight or see straight. It was happening all over again. But then Jake said something in my room today that he’s never said before.”
I hold my breath.
“Wh-wh …” Dad is trying to ask what.
Mac answers. “I’m not going anywhere, Princess. Not—”
“Ever again,” I finish for her.
She lifts her head, startled, her green eyes finding mine. They fill rapidly and she blinks. “You found me.”
I want to tell her that I’ll find her no matter where she goes, but the truth is that Mac is more slippery than an eel. I’d have better luck finding the secret city of Paititi. “Dad had the duty nurse call me. She told me it was urgent, but she didn’t say that you were here. I just assumed Dad needed me.”
He pats the bed, indicating to come closer. “Mar-mar-m … M…”
“Yes, Dad. I asked her to marry me.”
His face fixes in a scowl.
“I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner.”
“Gr-gr …” He grabs my hand in a tight grip when I go to finish for him. I wait. “Gr-graaandparr.”
“And you’re going to be a grandpa.”
His lips tremble. He slams them together, and his head moves back and forth on the pillow, back and forth, back and forth. He’s worked up. Releasing emotion is difficult for him.
“Mike,” Mac says in a calm, normal tone, unaffected by his actions. “I’m going to read to you now.”
She twists awkwardly in her seat, trying to reach for the cupboard by his daybed. It’s always filled with library books, the pages old and worn and read a thousand times by thousands of people. How does she know they’re there?
I walk around the bed and crouch in front of the cupboard. “I’ll get it,” I tell her, opening the door. There’s a haphazard pile inside. “Which one are you up to, Dad?”
But he can’t answer, his head is jerking around. “The Matthew Reilly one,” Mac answers. “The Four Legendary Kingdoms.”
I look up at her. “How do you know?”
“I read to him,” she says softly. “Every fortnight.”
“You …” I can’t catch my breath.
“He’s family, Jake.”
Loyal to the bone. That’s my girl. And it makes my heart so full I can barely stand it. I grab for the book. Blindly. Because my vision is blurred. I hand it to her. She finds her place in the story and begins to read. And as her voice carries through the room, slow and repetitive, my father begins to calm.
I don’t know how it’s possible to fall in love with someone more than once, but I do.
I pull my phone out and tap a message to Travis.
Found her. She’s fine. Will bring her back to the hospital in an hour.
After hitting send, I put it away and drag an uncomfortable chair toward my father’s side. We both sit there listening to her tell a story. And for the first time since I met Mackenzie Valentine and went on this crazy ride, I finally feel complete.