Page 89 of Second Alarm
"I was going to tell him, Ty."
"I know."
"And then the pager — "
"I know."
"And now — "
"I know."
She doesn't finish the sentence. She doesn't have to. The sentence is:I can't tell him tonight.And also:I was going to, and then the world nearly took him, and I can't take him again with my own words.
I know.
I hold her in the hallway of Missoula General outside room 314 while her mother drives toward us from Copper Ridge, and I don't tell her she still has to do the telling, and she doesn't tell me she will. What's between us in this hallway is the specific silence of two people handed a version of the worst-case scenario as a preview — and both of us are holding it up to the light, looking at it from every angle, and coming to the same conclusion: we can't keep doing any of this the way we've been doing it. We aren't going to. The next forty-eight hours will prove it.
"Ty."
"Yeah."
"Take me home. Not to your place, not to mine — I mean Copper Ridge. Home. Just take me home."
"Your mom is — "
"She'll be here in forty-five minutes. Cal is out. There's nothing to do here. I need to not be here."
"Okay."
She pulls back. Her face is still wet. She looks up at me.
"I almost lost him."
"I know."
"I'm not going to lose him."
"I know."
"I'm not going to lose you either." Her eyes hold mine steady. "That wasn't a question."
"Okay."
"Take me home, Ty."
"Okay."
I take her home. I don't leave.
Behind us, in room 314 of Missoula General, my best friend sleeps off a concussion and doesn't yet know — won't know for twenty-two more hours, won't know until a carton of kung pao chicken hits the floor of his own kitchen — that the person holding his sister's hand in that hallway was the same person who's been holding it since 2016, in silence, and the silence is running out. Not because we got caught. Because the world almost took him from us, and we aren't willing to let it take us from each other in any version where he lives and we pretend we don't.
Chapter 17
Hanna
Ty doesn't leave.
He drives me back from Missoula in his truck, one hand on the wheel and one on the center console where my hand is. The drive is an hour. I don't remember any of it. The highway is dark. There are elk on the roadside somewhere around Lolo, and I look at them and don't register they're elk until we're five miles past, and I say, flatly, to the windshield, "Those were elk."
