I woke to yelling. What sounded like a dozen voices probably wasn’t, but my head was fucking killing me, so it was just an echo in a chamber at the moment.

I rolled to check the clock, but fell abruptly to the floor, knocking the wind out of me.

I wasn’t home. Where the fuck was I?

Then, the pain burned through the impact of hitting the floor and I groaned aloud. I pressed my head to the wood floor, but then pulled away after the reverberations of people running around the room tapped against my aching skull. My body felt broken in a dozen places, aching and burning all over.

Pulling myself to sitting, I finally realized where I was—Ames’ flat. The living room. It was dark, and a quick look outside told me it was dark out there too. Which caused me to wonder at the noise running around the apartment.

“Oh my god,” a familiar female voice screamed from the hallway. I lifted my head, seeing Lotte in her pajamas, hands clutched against her head. The look of anguish on her face was so plainly written that I could feel it from several meters away.

“Lotte?”

Her head whipped to me and she braced her hand against the wall. “Sam.”

Asher, Lotte’s dad, barreled down the hallway at a speed I didn’t know he’d possessed. He kept dropping the things in his hands, sending them rolling away in loud succession.

“We have to go,” Lotte said, but her face was stricken, her eyes wide and red bruises under them.

“What’s going on?” I jumped to my feet, realizing that something was very wrong. I was still disoriented as I tried to piece how I came to be on Ames’ sofa, with … slippers on my feet?

“Hospital,” Asher said, barely sparing me a glance as he moved past Lotte toward the stairs.

I hadn’t seen Ames yet. “Where’s Ames?” I asked, panic finally settling in. Something was horribly wrong.

“He’s left already. He’s gone. We need a taxi.” She shook her head and fell back against the wall of the hallway. “Oh my god.” She made a sound that didn’t sound entirely human and I quickly made my way to her to keep her from sliding all the way off the wall to the floor. Once she was in my arms, I half-carried, half-walked her down the stairs, into the pub her family owned, and put her in a chair next to Asher as I called for a taxi.

I still didn’t know what was going on, but between Asher’s nearly-dead eyes and Lotte’s look of complete shock, I didn’t think I could ask what it was, what was wrong.

The taxi arrived blessedly quick and I pushed them both in before following. Asher told the driver which hospital, and we cruised along the road at one in the morning toward something I wasn’t at all prepared for.

Ames was pacing the waiting room when we arrived. His hair was in a hundred places, and his face was absent of color apart from the red around his eyes.

Seeing my best mate like that, like he’d battled through several emotional wars single-handedly, was enough to cause me to stop walking.

Lotte and Asher pushed past me, into his arms, and I watched as his arms curled them in to himself, and then watched the unmistakable shudder of sobs wracking his body.

He tried to talk, but his jaw was shaking so much that he couldn’t get the words out.

Something had happened to Mal, the love of my best mate’s life. And, judging by the way the three of them clung to one another, it was bad.

I lowered myself to the closest chair and stared at a spot on Asher’s back as it moved up and down, making me go cross-eyed with each sob Asher released.

“Do you need to be seen?”

I turned to the voice, a nurse looking at me peculiarly.

“What? No. I’m here…” I gestured to Ames, Lotte, and Asher, “with them.”

Her face fell, wrinkles settling in around her eyes. “Oh, right. I’m so sorry.” She handed me a plastic-wrapped pad of cotton. “You’re bleeding.” She tapped on her chin. “Right here.”

I stared at the cotton in my hand like I didn’t know what I was holding. I did, but the last thing I was concerned with at that moment was pressing this square to my face.

Especially when my best friend was falling to pieces mere steps from me.

The nurse left us, and Lotte pulled away, wiping her face as she stared up at Ames with fear in her eyes. Ames moved Asher into a chair and he turned to Lotte, holding her arms as she held his. I didn’t know who was supporting who.

I made my way to them both. Ames blinked at me, as if he was just realizing I was here. “Sam.”

Putting my arm around him, I tried to wrap my head around this.

Mahlon was in trouble. I didn’t know what kind of trouble, or what the prognosis was, but I had three people falling apart surrounding me, and I needed to be there for them. These people were my family, people who often took me in when I’d run away from home as a teen, who’d fed me, clothed me, loved me.

I pulled Lotte in too, and she folded herself against my chest. She was so small, fragile. Her hands clutched at my shirt and I rubbed a hand down her back. Her body shook with unspent sobs, and I felt Ames move in my hold, like he was doing everything in his power to keep from splintering.

“It’s going to be okay,” I told Ames, squeezing his shoulder tight. “Hey.” I turned until he was looking me dead in the eyes. “I’m not going. I won’t leave.”

Ames blinked, sanity coming into his eyes. “Okay.”

“Sit. I’m going to get coffees.” I had barely made it a few meters before Lotte caught up with me.

“I’m coming with you,” she announced, and I wrapped my arm around her in answer.

She seemed composed enough, still crying, but she didn’t look as shell-shocked as she had before. “I hate coffee,” she said as we waited in line at the hospital café. “It’s like sludge.”

I ran a hand through my hair. “Yeah, well I don’t think anyone is getting sleep tonight.”

“I told her Ames was too good for her.”

She’d whispered it, but she was loud enough that I could still hear her. “What?” I asked—not because I hadn’t heard the words, but because I didn’t have any clarity.

“Mal. I—I told her Ames was too good for her. She’s been…”

She didn’t have to continue. I knew, from what little Ames would speak about it, that Mal had been grieving a bit differently than the rest of them.

“She’s my sister, and I told her that her husband was too good for her.” She pushed her hands into her hair, pulling, twisting, and I knew she was seconds from melting into grief.

“Hey, hey,” I whispered, placing my hands over hers, squeezing her hands to get her attention on me. “It’s going to be okay.” It was the second time I was saying it, but the words sounded hollow in my throat. “Mal is strong, she’s from good stock.”

“She was on her way home, texting me.” Lotte blinked rapidly and looked at me, eyes as wide as saucers. “I…” Her eyes glided over my face. “We don’t know what happened, but the car was found upside down, in a stream. She was still buckled, half of her face underwater.” She covered her face with her hands and then dragged her fingers down. “Oh my god.”

“Shh,” I whispered, holding her shoulders as she faced me. “You’re strong, like she is. You’re not going to fall apart right now. Ames needs you. Your dad needs you.”

She stared into my eyes as if I was preaching the gospel.

“You’re going to get through this. No matter what happened before we got here, Mal loves you. You love her. Nothing else matters.”

She nodded, but she seemed almost as if she was in a trance.

I tilted my head to the side. “Hey. Let’s get those coffees and settle in until we get some news.”

She nodded again, but she looked more alive around the eyes. She gently touched the torn skin on my chin before pulling away.

“I’m guessing I look terrible,” I said with a humorless laugh, rubbing a hand over my chin and wincing. “Not my best moment.”

“Yeah.” She shifted her weight. “Do you remember … what happened?”

I closed my eyes briefly. “I remember getting in a fight with a guy who was a little too aggressive at the pub. I don’t remember what we said, but he got the first one in.”

“Ames had to carry you inside.”

“That’s how I ended up on the sofa?”

She nodded solemnly, and ordered the coffees once we’d made it to the front of line. “Do you…” She swallowed and the line between her eyebrows deepened. “Do you remember anything else?”

I stared at her a beat longer than I should’ve, searching. She was weary, her eyes swollen and her skin pale. She could’ve been knocked over with a feather. “No,” I told her. “Why?”

She turned away from me, pulling out some money. I put my hand on hers, stopping her, and handed my cash over. With her head bent down, she picked up two of the coffees, and walked away.

What I’d said had bothered her, I knew. And I felt like an arsehole for it.

But I’d lied to her, like the spineless coward I was.

I remembered all of it.

The kiss.

Calling her Della.

The way she’d run from the room.

It was too early. The timing was wrong for this conversation. It was best, for the moment, if she thought I didn’t remember it.

I rubbed my hand over my face and followed her.

Ames and I were huddled along one wall, Asher was asleep a few seats away and Lotte was curled up in a ball opposite of us, her fingers playing along the muted wallpaper pattern, when a doctor stepped into the room and called Ames’ name.

He stood up slowly, like a man walking to the guillotine. Something about the doctor’s demeanor, the look in her eyes, compelled me to come up behind Ames and place a supportive hand to his back.

Lotte met my eyes briefly, and I hated seeing her looking so broken. There were entire oceans of pain in her eyes, and I was completely incapable of helping her swim through it.

The doctor said some words, and I felt the tremble of Ames’ entire body against the flat of my palm as the doctor delivered the news that would saw him in half.

As quickly as she’d arrived, she stepped away, leaving me pulling Ames against me.

He made unintelligible noises, hands clutching at my shirt like he was trying to dig his way out of a hell I couldn’t imagine. I met Lotte’s eyes over his head, as I held my best mate in my arms. Her bottom lip fell open, and she emitted the saddest sound I’d ever heard.

I dragged Ames to where she sat, pulled her in with us, thankful for the moment that Asher was still asleep, and not bearing witness to what happened when news of his oldest daughter’s death hit the rest of his family members with the impact of a tractor trailer.

Mal was dead. I couldn’t wrap my head around that. This family, who’d only just lost their mother months before, now had to contend with the loss of a wife, a sister, a daughter.

What made all of this worse, I knew, was that this was only the beginning. This was the earthquake, and even after we put the world back together as best as we could, there would still be aftershocks in all of us—in them especially—and I didn’t know when they’d hit. I just knew I’d be there, through all of it, for them.