It's been five years since the sudden disappearance of Cora Cadigan's mother. Five years since the case was closed before it even began.
In the final summer before the end of high school, Cora knows it's her last opportunity to find the answers she...
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"What?"
I'd never warmed to hospitals. I knew the bravery of so many nurses and doctors, of the lives saved every day. I knew there was good but when there was bad, it often overshadowed all else. Death was a scary thing, attached to this very institution. I could never look past the sorrow in the rooms, the people losing their loved ones. It was a place of misery and no amount of bright paint on the walls would ever say otherwise.
"I'm— he's...Tea," I whisper, "I don't know what to do."
"I'm coming," Teagan says sternly down the phone. I can hear her speaking on the other end, likely shuffling around her room. She'd informed me that she'd left the party twenty minutes ago, a sulking Ryan not far behind her.
I'd yet to ask her about what was happening with Cameron but it was a conversation for another time. My head was consumed with thoughts of my unconscious father, lying slumped against the bathroom floor, his breathing shallow.
"You don't have to," I whisper, "you being on the phone with me is enough."
"Shut up, CeCe," she quips. "I'm coming right now. I won't let you go through this alone."
She hangs up shortly after, promising to be there as soon as she could. It was hard when the hospital was so far away. It had scared me riding in the back of the ambulance with dad, watching the paramedics fuss over him. As much as I had pleaded with them, they couldn't tell me what exactly was happening. They wouldn't be able to tell me until we had arrived at the hospital.
I'd been sitting alone in the waiting room for almost an hour. Other than the grief-stricken women seated opposite me, no one else is here, in the waiting room. The nurse at the front desk is tapping her fingers against the counter, chewing gum like she doesn't have a care in the world. The lights blink above me, casting shadows across the floor.
A headache was slowly forming in the back of my head, slowly descending to the front. It would become a migraine, I was sure. I hadn't had one in years, the last one being around the time mum vanished. Despite the pain, I welcome it. It took me away from the awful memories seared into me of my father, lying helpless on the ground as I had shouted at him, cursing him to wake up.
