Forbidden Doctor - R. S. Elliot Page 0,56

for her daughter’s accident. Once we’d managed to talk about it all, though, Jodie had melted. She’d become someone just as warm as her daughter, and we’d become shoulders for each other to lean on.

She’d called me a fool for punching Aaron Christophers but had bandaged my hand and patiently listened to me rant. That had been almost two weeks ago, and I couldn’t imagine having gone through everything with Stevie without her being an amazing support and mother, although I suspected I was also supporting her.

I squeezed Stevie’s hand and closed my eyes against the image of her tucked into bed. I wanted one of those little miracles you see in movies to happen, where her fingers twitch while I hold them, and, within an hour, she’s up and talking to us.

Of course, I should have just been grateful that she was starting to breathe on her own—it was progress. The thing I had wanted so desperately.

“She’s breathing?” A voice intruded on our quiet moment.

I looked towards the door, and Jack Lehaney stood there, eyes suspiciously bright.

“She is, or beginning to at least,” Jodie said softly, and a couple tears fell from her own eyes.

Jack came to stand by Stevie, and there was a kind of hope written on his face that I wished I could access. He already knew where he stood for the girl in the bed. He was a best friend, and when she woke up, he would love her, and she would love him. He didn’t need to worry anxiously about whether she’d still have him. I hated myself for not being able to just be proud of her, like he clearly was.

I didn’t want to be rude to Jodie or Jack, so I just told them I needed to think. For the first time since the accident, I went back to my house for more than the supplies I might need for a long-term stay in the hospital.

My house had changed a little bit. It was clean, for starters. There was a note on my door in handwriting that I recognized as Jonah’s, telling me to look after myself. I didn’t know when he’d left the paper there, but it was curling at the edges. I imagined him walking past it every time he got me things I needed. Jonah was expecting me to bounce back. He was my friend and knew me better than almost anyone else in the city. He was expecting all of this to blow over, like Stevie might be a temporary infatuation or her coma might not be as serious as all that. I wanted to tell him, so badly, that he was right. That I’d be okay, that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Even though I had planned to just spend some time thinking before I made any decisions, I sat on my sofa and stared at the ceiling. There was a suspicious prickling in my eyes, and before I knew what was happening, I was crying.

I hadn’t cried like that in a long time. Not since I was in high school, actually.

“Adrian,” my father said, “it’s—it’s Mom.”

I stared up at him, his brown eyes holding all the fear and insecurity that I felt. All the months of waiting. His lips were pressed so tightly together that they disappeared into his mouth, and I knew what he was trying to say because I’d known for months that the conversation we were about to have was inevitable.

But I would make him say it. Because there he was, sitting in front of me like there was nothing he could have done to prevent any of it. Maybe, one day, I would forgive him. I would understand that being a layman in the face of impossible news shuts down the part of your brain that needs you to think, to argue, to fight.

But I would never, as long as I lived, forgive the man that sat in the seat over from him. We were in an empty conference room, and I was as sure then as the day I’d met him that Dr. Aaron Christophers was a fraud. He claimed he cared, but I knew he was power-hungry, and the only reason he hadn’t taken a chance was in case she had died, on the table, under his care, before he could make a spectacle over the rarity of the illnesses that were spreading like wildfire through her body. I hoped he was happy, happy that his case study had been published nationally