A nurse ghosted to Max’s side like a spirit. “Jed’s blood pressure has dropped very low. Dr. Greene is on his way.”
“What does that mean?” Nick’s voice cut through the terrifying panic beginning to take hold of Max.
Max rounded on him. “Get out. Get the fuck out. He wouldn’t want you here.”
“I’m his brother.”
“No, you’re not!” Max shouted. “You’re not anyone’s anything. If you were, this would never have happened to him.”
Color ran from Nick’s face. He fled the room and Max fell into the closest chair and scrubbed his face. It was wrong to blame Nick for all Jed had been through. Jed didn’t. Nick had been seventeen when Jed left town. Some young men knew their minds by that age, but Jed said Nick had never been that man. He was easily led, and who better to lead him than his own father? Max stared at Jed. Was that really true? He’d never know, but as Dr. Greene’s shadow darkened the doorway, it didn’t matter anymore.
Max absorbed the bone-chilling news of septic shock with muted devastation. He put his hand on Jed’s chest, felt the too-fast stampede of his fractured heart and thought of his own father, of the man who’d been something of a stranger, and yet had known Max so well. He thought of Makemba too, the woman who’d loved him to death, but remained ignorant of a fundamental part of his being that made him who he was.
Jed was different. He owned a part of Max he’d never given to another. Was it too much to ask that they be given the chance to see it through, or was he doomed to love only ghosts?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THESILHOUETTEof a man darkened the doorway. Max squinted over his shoulder. It was 8:00 a.m. and he felt tired… more tired than he could ever remember, but something about the shadow felt familiar. The man was tall and strong, with sandy-brown hair, dog tags beneath his T-shirt, and Army insignia tattooed on his arm.
The man was a soldier.
Max scrambled to his feet. “Glenn?”
The soldier tilted his head to the side and grinned. “The very same. You must be Max.” He held out his hand and pulled Max into a hug. “Good to meet you.”
Max absorbed the unexpected, warm embrace. He knew Glenn’s face from the photographs Paul had left Jed, but how on earth did Glenn know him? “I don’t understand. How… why are you here?”
Glenn looked beyond Max and his easy grin faded like it had never been there at all. “A doctor from this hospital left me a message in Colorado a while back. Wanted me to decipher the notes I made in the field. I called him up a week ago and figured I’d come take a look for myself. What the hell happened?”
Max was at a loss for words. He looked to the open door for help, but none came. “He picked up an infection a few days ago.”
Glenn picked up the thick chart at the end of the bed. “Is he septic? I thought he was in to treat the anemia.”
“He had a….” Max faltered. “A camera in his stomach? They think it might have happened then.”
“An endoscopy?” Glenn scanned Jed’s notes again. “What did they find?”
Max had no answer to that. He’d never been told what they’d found when they’d looked inside Jed, and he hadn’t thought to ask.
Glenn went back to flipping through Jed’s chart. Max wondered what he was looking for until he remembered Glenn was a doctor.
“Most overqualified medic I ever did see. Guy shoulda been a brain surgeon.”
Glenn’s name seemed to come up every time Jed talked about his life in the Army—paratrooper training, Africa, Iraq. He’d been there at the beginning, and chances were he’d been there at the end. Damn. The man standing at the foot of the bed was one of Jed’s closest friends.
“How long has he been like this?”
Max snapped back into the present. “Since yesterday. It happened fast.”
Glenn whistled. “An invisible enemy. He won’t like that.”
“I wasn’t here,” Max said flatly, as though Glenn hadn’t spoken. “I was at home. Asleep.”
He let himself drop back into the chair at Jed’s side. The urge to press his face into Jed’s cool hand was strong, but he let it pass. He knew Glenn was aware of Jed’s sexuality, but sometimes knowing and seeing were two different things.
A pensive silence settled over the room. With his easy grin, Glenn had slipped into the room like he’d been there all along, but Max could see the lines of desperate worry beginning to form on his face. He studied Jed’s chart, muttering things under his breath, and occasionally touched the strange bruises marking his torso.
“Do you mind if I take a look at his leg?”