Page 96 of Before You Fell

The journalist keeps pressing. “There are reports that Willow Hart was hospitalized after a suspected overdose last night. Do you have any comment on her condition?”

My lungs stop working.

“Fuck,” Jax mutters.

I turn my head toward him, but the room is already breathing wrong. The lights are too bright. The microphones stretch too far across the table. Every camera lens becomes a little black mouth, waiting to swallow this and spit it back out with ads running beside it.

Jax, who never shuts the fuck up, has gone completely still.

I look at him and see it on his face before he turns the phone toward me. That awful, bloodless shock. The kind that doesn’t ask questions because it already knows the answer might fuck you up.

I glance down anyway.

Willow Hart, songwriter of Static Hearts, hospitalized after suspected overdose.

There are words beneath it. A photo of her from an old event.

My chest locks up. It’s as if someone has reached inside me, wrapped a fist around my ribs, and squeezed until every ugly thing I have ever refused to feel claws up my throat.

The room pulls away from me. The table. The mics. The cameras. The hungry faces. All of it drains away until only Jax’s phone, Willow’s name, and the word hospitalized remain, sitting there like a loaded gun on the table.

Suspected overdose.

No.

No.

No.

My chair scrapes back hard enough to tip over and I am on my feet.

“Phoenix,” Damon snaps, moving quickly.

I don’t acknowledge him as I turn away from the table.

Jax stands too, his face white. Jett rises without a word. Cruz is up a second later, the bored mask gone so completely that it’s as if he never wore it.

The reporters start talking over each other.

“Phoenix, were you aware?”

“Is Willow still connected to the band?”

“Will the tour still go ahead?”

“Can you comment on the overdose?”

Overdose.

The word follows me as I walk away from the table. It sticks to my back. Gets under my skin. Crawls into my blood with the whiskey, the weed, and all the other shit I used last night to pretend there was not a Willow-shaped hole chewing through my chest.

Jax catches up at my side.

“She’s at St. Vincent’s,” he says, his voice tight. “The article says she was taken in overnight.”

Overnight.

She was in the fucking hospital overnight and I was a drunk fuckhead on my couch, smoking myself stupid because my mother had called for money.