Page 103 of This Beautiful Lie
Dean squeezed my hand, and I forced myself to smile, but unease had already started to coil low in my stomach. I couldn’t shake the feeling that what waited for us at the end of the trail wasn’t the same world we’d left at the lake.
When the lodge finally came into view, a flash of red and blue lights cut through the trees, washing over the wood like a warning.
The air was different. Tense. Buzzing with something sharp. Panicked voices carried from the entryway of the lodge, rising and falling with frantic beats. My stomach knotted as Dean’s hand broke from mine, and he started to run.
Inside, there was chaos. People were crowding near the hall, voices overlapping, faces pale and panicked. And then I saw her—Blair being wheeled out on a gurney, her skin ashen, her shorts bloodied.
For a second, everything tilted sideways.
“Blair!” Dean’s voice cracked as he shoved through the crowd. “What happened? What the hell is going on?”
No one answered him. Aunts, cousins, Trisha—they all avoided his gaze, their faces tight with something unspoken.
The EMTs didn’t pause, didn’t explain—they just rushed her toward the ambulance, pushing her in through the open doors.
Dean lunged forward, but Mason caught his arm. “Dean—calm down!”
“What the hell is happening?” he snapped, his voice edged with panic. “Is she hurt?”
But Mason only shook his head, his expression grim.
The siren wailed as the ambulance doors slammed shut, and soon it was pulling away from the lodge, heading toward the gates.
Dean spun on his heel and began running toward our cabins.
“Dean, wait!” I yelled.
He turned around, and the torment I saw in his expression was my undoing. My knees felt weak, but I somehow held myself upright. “I’m going with you.”
Ten minutes later we were in his jeep, gravel spitting beneath the tires as we sped down the winding mountain road.
Memories splintered through me—unwanted, unrelenting.
The sterile walls of a clinic. The sharp scent of antiseptic. The crushing weight of being nineteen and alone, holding myself together with trembling hands pressed to my stomach in the dark.
I blinked hard, but the sting of those memories clung, threading themselves into me until I couldn’t tell where thepast ended, and the present began. By the time we reached the hospital, my body felt wrung out.
The automatic doors slid open in a rush of cold air and fluorescent light. Dean’s stride was long and furious—mine barely keeping up as he cut through the lobby. A nurse pointed us down a hall, and before I had time to catch my breath, we were there—at Blair’s door.
Dean opened it without knocking, and we stumbled inside, finding a doctor seated at Blair’s bedside, a Doppler gliding over the curve of her stomach.
The steady, rhythmic sound of a heartbeat filled the room—strong, sure, impossibly loud.
Dean froze. His confusion etched itself through every line of his face, his hands curling into fists at his sides as though he were desperately trying to reconcile what he was seeing.
The doctor glanced at him, then at me. “Do you know them?” he asked Blair.
Blair’s eyes flicked up, wet with tears when she nodded. “Yes. They’re my family.”
“Is it okay if they stay?”
There was a beat of silence before she nodded, then sobs wracked her body, and she turned back to the monitor. The flicker of a heartbeat danced along the screen.
“Everything looks normal,” the doctor said. “The baby’s measuring at about ten weeks. Bleeding can be frightening, but it’s not always a sign of miscarriage. Sometimes it happens at this stage of pregnancy.”
Blair’s lips trembled. Her hands curled into the sheet, and I moved closer to her, placing my hand on her shoulder.
Dean stayed rooted, but I recognized fear in his expression that was bone-deep and paralyzing.
