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She hisses out a breath and stalks toward me. “Oh, aren’t you. Pretty sure that’s what you’ve been doing with Drew for months. Selling your snatch for his A’s. What would the school think of that if they found out the truth?”
I'm not playing this game with her. The second she gets in reach, I throw down the doors of all the anger, the heartbreak, the hurt I've been bottling up for weeks and throw it straight at her face in the form of my fist into her nose.
It collides with a satisfying crunch, then a thunderbolt of pain shoots into my knuckles and up my arm. Fucking worth it, though.
She doubles over, blood spraying through her fingers. "What the fuck?" she garbles.
I step around her with my bags and place them on the table. Then I strip my key off my key ring and drop both keys and the key card onto the floor near the table. I won't be back here again, that’s for damn sure.
“You can tell the school whatever you like. Let’s see who they believe...you...or Sebastian Arturo.”
The door slams behind me, and my hand stings while I carry the heavy bags, but I feel twenty pounds lighter after that confrontation. She's out of my life for good, and I don't need to open that door again.
Maybe to finally get closure with Drew, I need a confrontation with him as well? I don't feel strong enough for it, but I didn't feel strong enough to face Jackie either.
But maybe with Drew, only one of us will come out hurt, too. I just have to make sure it’s not me.
5
DREW
How did this happen? I thought she was doing better, according to the few nurses I could bribe to tell me what her doctor had put in her files. But shit, I should have considered that information would be tainted from the start since my father dictated it. He's always used her as leverage, and while he has control over her, he has control over me, and I fucking hate it.
I watch her sleeping in the hospital bed. We are in a private room back in a secluded corner, and I flinch every time someone walks past the door. I’m waiting for my father to appear, throw around demands, and try to take her home before she's safe.
The steady beat of her heart on the monitor reassures me, and I can't help but wonder if this is how Bel felt all that time with her mom at the hospital. As always, she's not far from my thoughts, even as my mother is my current priority. I think about her a second, the guilt a storm in my head like it always is when I think about her. Then I shove it all away and lean toward my mom's hospital bed, willing her to wake up.
This is the most time I've spent with her consecutively in years. My father started pushing me out toward the end of high school as my mother grew more ill, and I suddenly grew busier and busier with "obligations."
I don't know how long I sit there and watch her. Long enough that the nurse shift switches and the doctor who brought her to the hospital returns.
"Oh," he starts when he spots me in the chair. Like he's surprised to see me. "I'm glad you're here. Once again, I tried to reach your father and I wasn't able to get ahold of him. We got some of the initial test results back. Do you want me to show you, or would you rather I wait until we can reach your father?”
I shake my head. “No, please, anything you have I want to know about.”
He nods and turns to face my mother, grabs her charts, and does a few checks. Once he finishes circling her bed, checking her chest, and marking her chart, he tucks the pen into his breast pocket and faces me again. “Now, the main thing you need to know is she’s having trouble. Yes, she’s unconscious, but it’s not the end yet.”
I whoosh out an exhale and stare down at my hands, giving myself a moment before I slip back into my mask and meet his eyes. “So what now? Is there anything we can do to fix this?”
He studies me, and there is something in his eyes I can’t read when I usually can see right through people. “How long has your mother been having difficulty?”
I snort. Difficulty. “She’s been in and out of the hospital since I was ten or eleven. For as long as I can remember, she’s been fighting one thing or another. It seems to have gotten worse since I went to college, but I try to be there for her as much as I can.”
The doctor grabs the stool on the other side of the room to sit on and slides toward me, stopping a couple of feet away. "Drew, can I ask you something more personal?"
"Like what? It depends on what you want to know." If it's for my mom, though, there isn't much I'd hold back.
He frowns, lines growing bolder around his mouth and on his forehead. Something is wrong, and he's not sure how to tell me. A weight sinks from my chest to my stomach and drifts down, down, down like a rock in a lake. Shit. He just said she wasn't dying, so...why the hesitation?
"Doctor, whatever the problem is, just spit it out. This dancing around is making it worse." It's making me want to punch something, namely him, but I keep that little bit to myself.
He sits back and squares his shoulders. "Has either of your parents ever discussed if you're adopted?"
I blink, my mouth popping open.
He rushes on. "It's not something I'd usually be at liberty to discuss, but it was your blood work, not your mother's, where we found the discrepancies. So, legally, you have the right to know."
I blink again, wheels grinding in my head like an overworked car. "What?" I sputter.
