to trickle out of her slack mouth. “Get my phone. It’s on the island. Call 911. Tell them our address and that someone here has alcohol poisoning. Now,” I add, when Owen doesn’t move. He darts out of the room as I grab the edge of Emma’s sheet and try to clean out her mouth. The sour stench of vomit finally hits me, and my stomach rolls as I feel wetness seeping through the front of my T-shirt.
“How could you do this?” I whisper.
Emma’s chest is rising and falling, but slowly. Her lips are still tinged blue. I lift her hand and feel for her pulse beneath the clammy skin of her wrist. It hardly seems to move, especially in contrast to how fast mine is racing. “Owen! Don’t hang up! Bring me the phone!” I yell.
Owen returns to the bedroom, clutching my phone to his ear. “This lady says someone’s coming,” he whimpers. “Why is she poisoned?” he adds, his voice quavering as he stares at Emma’s limp figure. Her hair is hanging in her face, too close to her mouth, and I push it back. “Who poisoned her?”
“Nobody,” I grit out. Not literally, anyway. I can’t speak to whoever or whatever has been poisoning her mind these past few weeks, but I’m starting to think it’s not Derek. If Emma managed to avoid falling apart after she found out he and I slept together, surely she wouldn’t nearly kill herself over a few unanswered Instagram messages. There has to be something else going on here. I reach my hand out to my brother. “Give me the phone.”
He does, and I hold it to my ear. “Hello, help, I don’t know what to do next,” I say shakily. “I got her on her side and she threw up so she’s not choking anymore, but she’s also not moving. She’s hardly breathing and I can’t, I don’t know—”
“All right, honey. You did good. Now listen so I can help you.” The voice on the other end is no-nonsense but soothing. “An ambulance is on the way. I’m gonna ask you a few questions, and then we’ll know what to do until they get there. We’re in this together, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. Tears start slipping down my cheeks, and I take a deep breath to steady myself. I try to focus on the woman’s voice, instead of fixating on the two questions that keep rattling around in my brain.
Mine: How could you do this?
And Owen’s: Who poisoned her?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Maeve
Friday, March 27
My sister is crushing me, but in the nicest possible way.
It’s Friday afternoon, and I’ve only been home from school for half an hour. Bronwyn, who just took a Lyft from the airport, has her arms wrapped around my shoulders while I press my phone to my ear in my bedroom, trying to make sense of what Phoebe is telling me. “Well, that’s good, right?” I ask.
“I think so.” Phoebe sounds exhausted. When she didn’t show up at school today, I was worried something else might have happened with Intense Guy. Knox and I sent her a bunch of increasingly urgent check-in texts, and she finally answered one during lunch to let us know she was at the hospital with Emma. She’d been there most of last night, she said, until her mom insisted she go home and try to sleep. She went back first thing this morning.
“They’re still giving her fluids, but they stopped the oxygen therapy,” Phoebe says now. “They say there shouldn’t be any long-term effects. But they’re talking about addiction treatment when she leaves the hospital. Like rehab or something. I don’t even know.”
“Did Emma say why she’s been drinking?” I ask.
“No. She hasn’t been awake much, though.” Phoebe sighs through the phone, long and weary. “It’s just one thing after another in this family.”
My throat tightens. Before I heard about Emma, I’d been itching to tell Phoebe everything we’d learned about Intense Guy last night, and press her to think harder about whether she might have come across him before. But I can’t put that on her now. One crisis at a time. “Can I do anything to help?” I ask.
“Thanks, but I can’t think of anything. I should go. I need to make my mom eat something. I just wanted to let you know Emma will survive.” She says it lightly, like it was never in question, but I’ve been anxious ever since her text came through earlier today. All I could think