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I wanted somebody to tell me why he couldn’t.

“Did she fall?” the nurse asked.

“I caught her,” Chief said. “She kept leaning down. She wouldn’t—”

He stopped.

I looked at Sadie.

“She didn’t hit her head,” she said. “She was sitting beside me. We were talking.”

There was no joke this time.

The nurse asked whether I thought I could stand. Chief shifted immediately, one hand at my elbow, the other against my back.

“I can walk,” I told him.

“I know.”

He helped me anyway.

My legs felt strange beneath me. Not weak, exactly. More as though I’d been kneeling much longer than I remembered.

Apparently I had.

Megan stood near the steps, holding Chief’s bag.

I hadn’t seen her pick it up.

“Declan,” she said, coming toward us. “Here.”

He took it without looking away from me.

She stayed close for another step, her eyes moving between his face and the hand he still had on my arm.

“You want me to tell somebody where you are?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”

He didn’t ask her to come.

She stopped walking.

I noticed because, for once, she was the one left watching his back.

The nurse’s office was cold enough that the sweat on my skin turned unpleasant.

I sat on the edge of a narrow padded bed with a paper cup of water between my hands. Chief stood beside the door. Sadie had brought my bag and the half-eaten sandwich, still folded in its paper.

The sight of it nearly made me cry.

I had been eating lunch. That was all I’d been doing.

The nurse called Dad. She described what had happened without using any of the words I wanted her to use.

A moment. A little spell. Nothing.

She said I had been unresponsive.