Don't Speak (A Modern Fairytale, #5)(61)

“Sir, you want those blues set aside, or what?”

“No, I . . . Thank you. I . . . I have to go.”

He hung up the phone and stood up, pacing his room, trying to figure out what to do. Running a hand through his hair, he had a sudden idea and opened a Web browser on his phone.

Hospital. Outer Banks hospital. Nags Head.

He punched the address into his map app.

An hour.

It would take only an hour to be there by her side, offering whatever comfort she needed.

Racing down the stairs, he grabbed his keys from the basket in the vestibule and ran out the door to his car.

***

Laire woke up at the Hatteras Health Center on Friday night, her head aching something awful. When she opened her eyes, she whimpered from the pain and quickly closed them again.

“You knocked yourself out,” said Kyrstin’s voice, flat and low. “Needed eight stitches.”

Laire opened her eyes slower the second time, focusing on Kyrstin’s face. She sat between the two clinic beds on a mint-green stool, looking at Laire over her shoulder.

“Daddy?” Laire gasped, finding her throat dry and scratchy.

“Still out of it.”

“But . . .,” whispered Laire, “is he . . .?”

“Alive?” she asked. “Yeah. No thanks to you.”

Laire gasped from the sudden rush of relief, her eyes instantly burning from tears.

“Awake?”

“In a . . . a coma,” Kyrstin whispered, her voice breaking. Then she turned back around to face their father, lying in the opposite bed.

Laire winced in pain, whimpering softly again before closing her heavy eyes and falling back to sleep.

When they moved her father up to Nags Head the next morning, Issy tried to stop Laire from going with him, claiming that seeing her when he woke up would just upset him all over again. But Kyrstin had been a surprising ally, telling Issy that Laire had as much right to go up to Nags Head as they did. She wasn’t exactly warm and affectionate, but she stood up to Issy until Issy backed down in a huff.

Laire and Kyrstin called a taxi service from Hatteras and paid a hefty fee to be driven up the coast. It only occurred to Laire as they pulled away from the health center that she could have called Erik and asked him to drive them. But, for the first time since meeting him, the thought of Erik didn’t fill her with warmth or excitement or happy tingles. She felt desperately sad and confused as she stared out the taxi window thinking about him, some significant part of her blaming him for what had happened to her father. If she and Erik had been more responsible, if they’d been able to stay away from each other, if he hadn’t pursued her so damned doggedly in the beginning, this never would have happened.

So quickly, the magical, secret world she and Erik had built all summer had been toppled—tarnished beyond recognition when her father fell to the ground, clutching at his chest. Laire inhabited a grotesque new world now, in which her beloved father was glad her mother was dead—a world in which he had almost been killed by her irresponsibility.

It made her feelings toward Erik much more complicated than they’d been on Thursday, much less black-and-white. What if loving Erik ended up killing her father? How could that love be right? It couldn’t be. Which meant that loving Erik was just a fantasy. A self-serving, self-indulgent, childish fantasy that, left to their wild, unhampered, unchecked desires, had raged out of control, hurting someone she dearly loved. And more than a fantasy, it was wrong. And the worst of it was, on some level or another, she’d known it was wrong all along.

On the interminable ride from Hatteras to Nags Head, with these terrible thoughts swirling, Laire’s conscience tidily relegated her worth to the darkest, lowest level of shame, propelling her into a state of guilt—of such profound, profane, breath-catching, terrifying guilt—that her love for Erik felt almost unbearable.

Her father lay prone in a hospital bed, his prognosis still uncertain.

She had no right to happiness or love.

Not now and maybe not ever.

That was her new reality.

Their father was settled into a room in the cardiac unit, and in a strange twist of events, Issy, who prided herself on being the most caring and responsible daughter of the three, wasn’t able to sit by their father’s bedside. She wasn’t permitted to bring baby Kyle into the adult wards, due to a breakout of pneumonia. With Paul at the height of his sea-fishing season and her in-laws unable to watch the baby for more than a day, this meant that Issy had had no choice but to return to Corey with her son, leaving her younger sisters with their father.

Kyrstin and Laire, who checked into a motel in Nags Head, took turns sitting beside their father’s bedside, hoping against hope that he’d wake up soon.

On Sunday afternoon, with Kyrstin at the motel taking a nap, it was Laire’s turn, and she held her father’s weathered hand in hers, reading to him from the Bible and praying that she’d have more time with him.

“Laire.” She opened her eyes and looked up to see Nurse Patty, assigned to her father’s care, peeking into the room. “There’s someone here to see you. He’s at the nurses’ station.”

“My cousin? Harlan Cornish?”

“Didn’t catch his name. A man, though, with a big bouquet of flowers.”

Uncle Fox had called earlier to say that Harlan might be coming up to visit, and she almost cried with relief at the thought of seeing him.