Bowen
Three days after the plane crash…
When I was a child, my mom used to wake me up for school the same way each morning. She’d tiptoe into the dark room, settle on the side of my bed, and then sift her fingers through the top of my hair until I finally roused to peaceful consciousness.
I had no idea what day, week, or month it was, but it had been years since she’d woken me up like that. Yet, as my brain emerged from the darkness, I was still absolutely certain her fingers were the ones gliding through my hair.
“Bowen?” she said, her voice thick with emotion.
On instinct, I opened my mouth to reply, but it was too dry for words to pass through. What the hell? How much did I drink last night?
Her palm smoothed across my cheek, the warmth drawing me further from slumber.
“Come on, baby. Time to wake up,” she whispered urgently.
“’Kay.” I finally forced the one syllable through the desert of sand in my throat.
She let out a choking sob. “Go get the nurse. Hurry.”
The nurse? What the fuck?
At some point during the night, my eyelids had been replaced with lead shields. They were impossible to raise, but I tried anyway, waging an entire war to open them a slit.
“Oh, Bowen.” My mom appeared in my limited line of sight. Dark circles hung under her red tear-filled eyes.
My dad sidled up beside her, equal parts relief and hell on his face. “Oh, thank you, Jesus.” Tears leaked down his cheeks, causing a wave of confusion and alarm to crash over me.
I’d never seen my father cry before. Why now? What could have possibly—
Everything suddenly came back to me in a rush.
The deafening metal on metal.
The blood-curdling cries.
Bodies strewn across the runway.
The all-consuming panic as I rabidly searched to find her.
The hopelessness as I gave her CPR.
Remi.
Remi.
“Remi!” My whole body roared to life. Pain exploded in my chest as I attempted to sit up, but it was nothing compared to the agony inside me.
My dad pinned my shoulders to the bed. “Son, stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
I’d gotten my height from him, but he was no match for the adrenaline engulfing me.
“Get off me,” I seethed, my voice raw and jagged—just like my heart. With a hard-casted forearm, I tore the nasal cannula from my face before turning my frenzy onto the IV and blood pressure cuff. Everything fucking hurt. And that was not limited to the physical.
Where was she? Was she okay? Oh, God, she probably needed me, and I was laid up in a Goddamn hospital bed. Useless all over again.
While the monitors blaring with alarms mixed with my mother’s tearful prayers, Tyson came running into the room followed by another white coat and several nurses.
The doctor started calling off orders I couldn’t make out amid my panic, but Tyson interrupted him.
“No. No. No,” he pleaded. “Just give me a second and I’ll calm him down. I swear.” He didn’t wait for an answer before diving around my father, who was still fighting to keep me in the bed, and thrust a phone in my face. It was the most heartbreaking picture I’d ever seen, but his words stopped me in my tracks. “She’s alive.”
Head to toe, heart to soul, I froze, staring at his phone.
God. My Sally. She was covered in wires, both of her eyes blackened, casts covering her arms all the way up to her shoulders, and a tube went down her throat. If she was alive, it was barely, but if there was even one beat left in her heart, I needed to be there.
After sucking in a breath as deep as my aching chest would allow, I grunted, “Where is she?”
“She’s across town at Grady, and she’s stable. I’ll fill you in on everything, but you need to relax and let the doctors look you over. On top of the broken arm and lacerations on your legs, you have a punctured lung. They put in a chest tube, and if you don’t chill, they’re going to sedate you again to prevent you from ripping it out. Nobody here wants that. So please. I’m begging you. Take a deep breath and let them do their job.”
Growing up, Tyson had never been the family’s voice of reason. But, despite the fact that he had specialized in plastic surgery, he was the only person I knew who had actually been to medical school. I needed information on Remi, and he was the only one I trusted to give it to me straight.
Swallowing hard, I sagged into the bed as much as my stiff body would allow. There would be no relaxing, but being sedated wasn’t an option either.
“Fine,” I rasped.
My dad held me for a second longer, his honey-brown eyes that matched my own searching my face. He blew out a ragged breath and then finally released me.
The doctors and nurses took over after that. For several minutes, they reattached tubes and wires and took my vitals. The doctor had at least a dozen questions and just as many explanations, but my mind was still with Remi at a hospital on the other side of the city.
I was fine—or at least I would be. During the lulls in their examination, I found out it had been three days since the crash. It took my family a full twenty-four hours of thinking I was dead to get word that I was one of the lucky few who had survived. Since then, Tyson had been sleeping at the hospital around the clock along with my mom, and Dad and Cassidy had been holding down the fort at home with the dogs.
I was grateful beyond measure to have such an amazing support system, but it wasn’t me I was worried about. When the doctor was finally done and the nurses left the room with the promise of coming back with pain medicine, I laid into Tyson.
“Now, what’s going on with Remi? Why am I here and she’s at Grady?”
My mom sank to the side of my bed and held my good hand. The trauma of the last few days had dimmed her usually bright smile.
Tyson stood at the foot of my bed, his arms crossed over his chest, and calmly answered, “There were about forty survivors initially. First responders spread everyone out to hospitals across the city. That’s why it took us so long to find you.” He cleared the emotion from his throat, and I gave Mom’s hand a squeeze when her eyes welled with tears again. “There are only thirty-one of you left now. Six in critical condition. It’s”—he shook his head—“been a nightmare.”
I could definitely agree with him there. “Get to Remi. How is she?”
He sighed. “She broke multiple bones in each arm and had fractures on her clavicle and ribs. But all of those will heal. The biggest concern for her now is the swelling on her brain.”
A vise cranked down on my chest, and fears I never fathomed I’d need to have crashed into me like a tidal wave. “Her brain?”
“It appears she took a hard hit to the head. Her CT and MRI look promising, but they’re keeping her in a medically induced coma until they can get the swelling under control.”
My stomach churned and the weight of the entire world settled on my chest. As if she hadn’t been through enough already. As if the entire universe hadn’t been hell-bent on destroying her. Now she was fighting for her life in a different way. And God, I prayed with every fiber of my being that she still had enough fight left in her.
I covered my face as tears leaked from my eyes.
Why was everything so fucking hard?