I WAS IN turmoil, utter fucking turmoil.
I felt it churning within me, boiling up through my veins like a poison I couldn’t get rid of.
There was no chance of sleeping. The sun streamed through the flimsy curtains of my bedroom, and I sat up in bed. Running my hands through my hair, I looked around my modest bedroom.
Jumping out of bed, I gave up on any chance of catching shut-eye, and I did what I’d wanted to do since walking through the front door of my apartment two hours earlier. I started to get ready to go back to her.
When I was with Lailah, pure air would fill my lungs, healing me throughout, for what seemed like the first time in years. She gave me purpose and made me want to see the sunrise again. The moment I left her side, the guilt would come rushing back like a punishing ocean current.
I don’t deserve any of this.
Nothing I’d done in my life up to this point afforded me the luxury of enjoying a single minute of happiness with Lailah.
I’d caused the death of my fiancée. I hadn’t driven us into oncoming traffic, but I’d looked into her tired, droopy eyes, smelled the lingering alcohol on her breath, and still handed her the keys, knowing I shouldn’t have.
Because I had been selfish.
When she had been beyond repair, needing to be put to rest so that her family could mourn, I’d prolonged everyone’s suffering by trying to prove our love could survive anything—even brain damage. I’d listened to her parents sobbing behind me as I’d held her hands in mine. With tears pouring down my cheeks, I’d begged her to come back to me, but she hadn’t.
I’d hurt so many lives when I lost Megan, including the one person I’d never expected.
I didn’t deserve Lailah.
But I would take her. I’d take everything she gave me because I was selfish and tired of being alone. And I’d offer her everything I had left to give.
Surely, life wouldn’t be so cruel.
It was ironic that I was taking advice from the one person I despised.
My brother hadn’t suffered a day in his entire privileged life. He knew nothing about loss or pain. As his words echoed in my head, I couldn’t help but wonder if they held a bit of truth.
A twinge of guilt shot through my gut at the mere thought of anyone replacing Megan, but my brother was right. She was gone. I thought my world had ended when she died three years ago. Yet, here I was with air filling my lungs and blood pumping through my heart, and I felt everything because I was alive. I was still here.
My self-imposed exile had stripped me of everything I once was. I’d left my family, friends, and home.
Isn’t that enough?
I am still here. I am still alive.
Thirty minutes after giving up on sleep, I was showered, dressed, and driving my piece-of-shit car back to the hospital.
When I’d said I left my old life behind, I wasn’t kidding.
My parents had figured out fairly quickly that I had an affinity for numbers. I wasn’t like the guy in Rain Man or anything. I couldn’t solve equations in my sleep. I was more like the guy in the casino who gets accused of cheating at the slots, but they can’t prove anything because he was just really damn good. I was one of those. I saw patterns and simplicity while others saw chaos. I was always two steps ahead of the market, seeing trends and pitfalls before anyone else did. Ever since this little discovery, all my father could see were dollar signs. There was no soccer or swim team for Jude. Instead, I’d gotten to sit in on board meetings and listen to hour-long conference calls.
It’s good training, my father would say.
He hadn’t seemed to realize that I was also smart enough to see through his shit. I’d known exactly what he was planning. I’d managed to get away for college, but he’d still had his claws digging into my back, blowing up my phone whenever he’d needed something or flying me home when it had been too important.
I’d managed to keep most of it from Megan, but she’d known that life after we graduated would be different. I would be different. I’d spent every night of our last vacation awake, watching her sleep while worrying about what would happen when my father took over again.
Leave, a voice in my head had said. Just run away with her, it had pleaded.
But I hadn’t done that because I’d felt obligated to my family. They were my blood, and I’d thought I owed it to the company and the people who worked for us to ensure the survival of the business.
That all had ended the night Roman visited, begging me to come back. He hadn’t given a fuck about Megan or what I was going through.
Dollar signs—that’s all I was but not anymore.
I’d resisted every inclination to invest any extra change I had leftover month to month. Instead, I’d put some away, managing to save a meager couple hundred to cover a month of rent if needed. I was poor, dirt fucking poor.
If only Daddy could see me now…
My clunker of a car pulled into the parking lot behind the hospital, and I looked up at the building that had served as my refuge since moving to California. This was where I worked, but it was also where I could feel Megan—in the hallways, walking through the ER, in the tears of the mourning families.
It was my living monument to her, and I was the groundskeeper.
I moved across the parking lot and looked up to Lailah’s window on the cardiology floor as if it were a bright white beacon steering me to shore.
The hospital couldn’t just be a memorial anymore. It had to be more.
I had to be more—for her.
As soon as I approached the nurses’ station, I knew there was something amiss. Nurses on this floor moved at a slower pace than the ER. They would normally chat about their lives and gossip in the hallway.
Today, they were in hyper mode.
The nurses on duty were buzzing around, agitated and on alert, like they’d been spooked. Something had happened, and they were still working their way down from the adrenaline high. I’d seen it before a dozen times in the ER. Each and every person on this floor—hell, in this hospital—was trained for an emergency, but it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t scare the shit out of someone when the time finally came.
And in a place like this, it always did.
I looked around, trying to find someone I recognized. Day-shift people were mostly unknown to me as we would only see each other in passing, and since I wasn’t the most social person on the staff, I knew even less people.
But I did know one person.
Snow White.
Where is she?
I scanned the floor and finally saw her appearing from Lailah’s room. A mask was covering her face as she briskly walked to the nurses’ station. She glanced up at me from across the counter, and that was all it took. Her eyes told me everything I didn’t want to know.
I took off running down the short distance of the hall toward Lailah’s room, but I was stopped short when I was grabbed from behind. My fist came up, and I turned to swing at whoever was keeping me from entering that room.
“What the fuck, Marcus?” I growled.
“She’s sleeping and stable now.”
“Now? Now! What the hell does that mean?”
The grip he had on my arm lessened.
“The virus she’d caught got worse. Her fever skyrocketed in a short time, and her body went into distress. We were able to stabilize her and bring down the fever. Now, she’s resting.”
While he was talking, all I could think of was that I wasn’t here. She could have died, and I wasn’t here. She could have slipped away from this earth, and I would have never seen her smile again, never felt the joy of her tenderness. I’d known this girl for only a short time.
How did she come to matter so much to me?
“Can I see her?” I swallowed down the lump of emotions I felt welling up in my throat.
“Yeah, but first, I think we need to talk.”
I should have known this was coming. After my demanding display last night and the fact that her mother knew, it was only a matter of time before this happened.
But why does it have to happen now?
I glanced at Lailah’s closed door. The need to break through it and crawl up next to her was burning inside me.
“Okay,” I agreed.
By the look Marcus was giving me, I knew that there was no way I would get out of this.
He started toward the elevator, and I followed, hating that every footfall was one step further away from her.
She could have died.
The thought replayed in my head while we silently slipped into the elevator and rode it down to the cafeteria. I already knew where we were headed. This had been our tradition long before Lailah. We’d have crappy coffee and conversation where he’d do most of the talking, and I’d listen.
Taking a look at his rigid gait and tight expression, I guessed our roles would be reversed tonight.
We stood in line, ordered, and took a seat toward the back of the cafeteria. It was around eleven in the morning, so the traffic from lunch was just starting to filter in, but it was still relatively quiet.
Marcus leaned back in his chair and set his steely gaze on me. “Anything you want to tell me, Jude?”
No J-Man today. Just Jude.
“What do you want to know?” I took a long gulp of coffee that tasted like mud.
“I want to know why you lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie to you, Marcus—” I started.
He cut in, “No? You didn’t say that you’d stay away from Lailah? That you’d be a friend and nothing more?” His eyes were blazing.
During our conversation regarding Lailah, I’d never made any promises to Marcus and I couldn’t help but wonder where all this was coming from. “Look, I didn’t plan for this. I didn’t go into this expecting for any of this to happen.”
“You said you weren’t capable of loving anyone else, Jude. I trusted you,” he spit.
His use of the word love felt like a blow to my knees, spiraling me back to the night I’d proposed to Megan when I’d sworn I would love only her for the rest of my life.
“But I do love her,” my voice croaked out in disbelief as I stared down at the table, lost in my own head. Knowing something and acknowledging it were two entirely different things.
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“No, I’m sure. Just surprised. I didn’t think I was capable of it either.”
I finally looked up at him and found him watching me. Those punishing blue eyes worked and processed me like he was dismantling a clock or contemplating the space-time continuum.
“What changed?”
“Lailah. She changed everything. She makes me feel human again. I don’t dread living anymore.”
“But what are you doing for her?”
“What?” I asked.
“You just said how she makes you feel. What are you doing for her? What do you make her feel? I care about her far more than I care about you, buddy. If you want my blessing on this, tell me what you’re doing for my girl?”
My gaze narrowed as I looked at him, really looked at him. “What’s your connection to Lailah and Ms. Buchanan?”
“I’m Lailah’s doctor,” he answered in a clipped tone.
“Okay,” I relented, letting it go for now.
Eager to return to Lailah’s bedside, we rose from the table and threw our shitty coffee into the trash before heading for the elevator. As the doors slid closed and we made our way skyward, I felt Lailah’s presence growing as the gap between us lessened.
“You never answered my question,” Marcus said, cutting the silence like a knife.
“What question?”
“What are you going to do for Lailah?”
The elevator dinged, and the door opened. Both of us stepped off onto the worn laminate floor, and I gazed down the hall toward my sleeping angel.
“Everything. I’ll give her everything.”