“Would he?” Jack’s not looking at me. He swipes the tablet, unlocking it, but that’s as far as he gets before he shoves it away, frustration and blue light from the screen already bothering his fragile senses. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Why would you say that?”
Jack turns to me, rare anger burning hot in his green eyes. “Because everyone’s fucking hiding something. Especiallyyou.”
I flinch at that. Barely. But he catches it and steps closer, rattling the walls I’ve kept between us all these years with a frown that has nothing to do with confusion. A frown thatsees, like Mal does, and I can’t take it. I lie and it tastes like blood. “No one’s hiding anything from you. If you want to know something, just ask.”
A pause stretches out. Jack’s composure settles, but he’s still watching me like a soldier. Like aGallagher, maybe. “Where’s my brother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he go after someone?”
“Idon’tknow.” It’s easy to let real emotions seep into the words. To the truth. I don’t know where Mal is. What he’s doing. What he’s already done. “I wasn’t here when he left.”
“Are you all right?”
“What?”
“Skylar.” Jack moves even closer and his bulk swamps me, making me miss Mal’s subtle strength even more. “I know I’m a liability most of the time, but you can still talk to me. I’m fuckingherefor you.”
He always has been. But I can’t talk to Jack about the barbed wire in my gut any more than he can talk to me about the cracked part of his soul that aches so hard for Sol. It’s always been the worst thing to know he doesn’t even know what he’s lost.
Just that it’s gone.
I lie again. “I’m okay.”
Jack holds my gaze for a long moment. He holdsme. But his bandwidth expires. He lets it go, and I’m gone from the kitchen before he can pull his thoughts together again.
In my room, I stuff clothes into my work bag. Too many clothes. As if I’m heading out for a week. Or maybe forever. But my head’s not screwed on right. I don’t know what I’m doing. I justdo, I move, and I’m at my car before I know it, my broken phone tossed on the dash.
I’ve missed a sunny day and the air is beginning to turn humid, an incoming storm staining the blue skies I’ve slept through. It makes breathing hard. Or maybe I’m not trying.
I start the car and peel out of the space I jammed it in this morning. Speed keeps me conscious. Tight corners on deserted roads I have no business blasting round when I’m this fucked-up. But I do it anyway, until I reach the main road into Truro and I’m forced to behave. To be the person I am now, not the person I wasthen.
The hospital car park reels me in. I slide into a space with ten minutes to spare before handover.
Without the engine running, quiet swamps me. Even my racing thoughts fade as the evening sun brings some warmth tomy skin. I feel like I could sleep here. But I have a twelve-hour shift and then a wet bed to go home to. Anemptybed?—
My phone rings, blaring to life at the volume I need to wake me up in a run of heavy night shifts, the screen spiderwebbed with broken light, a chunk missing from the bottom corner.
Mal.
A dozen emotions hit me like a freight train, but hesitation wins out. Then panic as sharp as the shattered glass my day has been made of.
I grab the phone, but the sensor is fucked, and the screen flickers under my thumb like it’s taunting me. LikeMal’s taunting me, but the anger I’m so quick to reach for, it doesn’t last. Fear returns, laced with enough guilt to choke me. He’s calling me back. He’s reaching out. I’m right here, and yet…I’m not, and it fits the gnarly mess we’ve made of whatever him and me are meant to be.
Static sounds in my head.
It muffles my scream.
27MAL
My phone screen fades to black and I let it fall to the table in front of me.
Vintage.
The table, not the phone. It doesn’t match the tatty office chairs scattered around it, but I don’t much care for aesthetics.