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Cornell winced. “John’s going to give you another dose of medicine.” He supported her body with one arm, adjusting the pillows with the other.
“Cornell,” Ali said sleepily. “It was a car accident.”
He set Ali back against the pillows, smoothing her hair, dampened with sweat, back from her forehead. “It was. But you’re home now. It’s all over.”
A moan escaped Ali’s lips. “Why does it hurt so much?”
“Shh,” Cornell told her as John came back into the room with a pill and a glass of water. “Take this. It will help.”
Ali opened her mouth just enough to swallow the medication and the water.
“I’ll leave you two to get some rest. Come upstairs if you need anything,” John told Cornell with a firm nod of his head.
Ali sighed beside him as John left the room, closing the door. Cornell reached over, turning off the lamp before pulling the covers over both of them and laying on his side. “Are you tired?” he asked, placing his hand gently on her arm.
She hummed but didn’t answer, already on her way back to sleep, leaving Cornell to do the same. But sleep had already been a challenge, and that was the reason Cornell wasn’t beside Ali the moment the nightmare came, knocking her so hard with fear she fell out of bed. He tried to let Ali’s peaceful breaths, the soft rise and fall of her chest, lull him, but it was no more use then than it had been earlier.
“I knew it was off, but I called you,”Ali had said.
Cornell pulled his hand back from Ali’s arm, sitting up. He reached across to the nightstand for her phone. He unlocked it, ignoring the plethora of messages from Tara, and went to the call log. Scrolling, Cornell knew nothing about the exact time of the accident, only what John had told him, that a passing driver called the ambulance close to 9:15.
Ali had called him at 9:07 p.m. He thought of her phone buried deep beneath the driver’s seat and pressed his lips together, his body painfully tense. She had called just before the accident.
Cornell sighed, locking the phone and placing it back on the table, draping an arm gently across Ali, sticking his head into her hair spread messily across the pillow.
“I knew it was off, but I called you.”
She wasn’t talking about just now when I was in the study. She’s talking about before,Cornell realized, chills prickling his skin, when she dropped Graham off.
Sliding as close to Ali as possible, he took a pained breath, worried that he hadn’t just missed her call at that moment—Cornell worried he had missed something else entirely.
