Page 254 of Disarm
She goes pale.
“Is it—?” she asks, voice breaking.
“It’s his,” I say quickly. “Just… just a cut. Not—” My stomach lurches. “Not the main thing.”
She sucks in a breath like someone punched her.
Ashton looks like a man who’s been gut-shot and is trying very hard to pretend it’s a paper cut. His face is bloodless, his eyes too bright. “Is he—” he starts, then stops, swallows. “Have they said?—”
“No,” I say. “They… they just took him back. The paramedics said his vitals were… okay-ish. Low, but there. They… he was breathing.”
“Okay,” he says, like he’s pinning that word to the wall with a nail. “Okay.”
Mom lets go of my face only to pull me into a hug so fierce it knocks the air out of me. “No te vayas,” she whispers into my hair, words she used to say when I was little and had nightmares. “Don’t you go anywhere. You stay right here.”
“I’m not the one—” The protest dies in my throat because I get it. She’s counting heads. She’s doing her own version of a roll call.
We sit.
There’s only a single open chair next to me, Dad ends up standing, hands on the back of mine so tight his knuckles go white. Every few seconds, he adjusts his grip, like he can rearrange reality by moving his fingers.
“I got the call,” he says after a long, thick silence. “From the DA about the son of a bitch dying. I should’ve… I thought… I thought telling him would—” His voice cracks down the middle.
“Help him move on,” I finish, bitterness poisoning the words before I can stop it.
He flinches like I slapped him.
Mom’s hand tightens on my arm. “Miguel,” she says sharply, in that tone that’s half warning, half plea.
I shut my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the apology scraping. “I’m just—I’m tired.”
“We all are,” Ashton says quietly. When I look up, his eyes are shining. “But you have the right to be angry with me. I—” He swallows. “I keep underestimating how deep the wounds go. That’s on me.”
I don’t have the bandwidth to unpack that. My entire being is pointed at the double doors, willing them to open.
Eventually, one of them does.
A doctor in blue scrubs steps out, mask hanging around his neck, hair flattened like he’s been running his hands through it. He scans the waiting area and calls, “Family for Caleb Burton?”
We’re on our feet so fast the chairs skitter back.
“Yes,” Ashton says. “Yes, that’s—us.”
The doctor glances at the three of us, processes something in half a second, and nods. “I’m Dr. Miller,” he says. “I’ve been taking care of Caleb.”
“How is he?” I ask, voice too sharp. My hands are shaking again. “Is he—did he?—?”
“He’s alive,” Dr. Miller says immediately, and my knees nearly buckle with the sheer relief of hearing it from someone with a stethoscope. “We’ve stabilized him for now. His blood pressure was low on arrival, and his heart rate was depressed from the overdose, but his airway remained intact, and we were able to support his breathing with oxygen and medication.”
The words wash over me in a blur of medicalese. Only a few stick.
Alive.
Stabilized.
For now.
