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radio as Siri guides me through a series of complicated roundabouts and side streets. By the time I’m back out on open road,

Lisa is signing off, and John is promising to keep us updated as more information is available. I hit the off button as a

news broadcast starts up, and Siri tells me that in seven minutes, my destination will be on the right.

In seven minutes, I tell myself, I’ll find him waiting for me with minor injuries. I can already picture it—he’ll be in some

awful, sterile hospital room, and there will probably be all sorts of people at his side, but he’ll see me come in and crack

a smile, crooked and subtle and just for me. I’ll keep my distance until I can get him alone, and then he’ll make some smart

comment about me worrying about him and roll his eyes like I’ve been foolish. He’s like that, always playing things off, never

admitting weakness or defeat. But if Parrot and the others are as bad off as it sounds, he’ll be shaken. I probably won’t

have much time to be alone with him—fuck, his parents flew in for this race, didn’t they?—but I’ll take his hand and kiss

the very center of his palm—

“In three hundred meters, your destination is on the right,” Siri says, jerking me out of my thoughts.

As I turn into the hospital, I’m thankful for the bits of French I’ve learned over the years.

Stationnement, that’s the parking lot, although I’m not sure if it’s quite the right one.

The hospital seems to have several different buildings, and I drive past three separate entranceways before I find a parking spot.

I find the closest entrance and walk into a small, quiet waiting room with a registration desk. I get a horrible sense of

déjà vu as I walk in. I haven’t been inside a hospital since my dad died. He was already dead when I got there. The ER doctor

had called to tell me. For a moment, I feel a flicker of hope—Jacob can’t be dead yet, because no one’s called to tell me.

Then I shake my head at my own stupidity. Even if he’s dead, I’m the last person anyone would think to call.

The sign by the registration desk says “Enregistrement—Chirurgie Cardiothoracique,” which doesn’t sound right at all. The

woman behind the desk is speaking in rapid French to an elderly gentleman holding an appointment card. I wait behind him for

about five seconds before I spot a sign on the hall to the right that says “URGENCES.” I take off at a run—that must be the

ER.

There are a few more signs along the way, but the hospital is so big I keep getting lost. It doesn’t help that they’re doing

construction on some of the buildings. I’m getting increasingly desperate, typing “H?pital Nord emergency room directions”

into my phone when I spot a hospital volunteer wearing a bright red vest.

“Est-ce que je peux vous aider?” she asks cheerfully.

“Emergency room?” I blurt out, too anxious to remember what it was called in French.

“Ah, oui,” she says, before switching to heavily accented English. “You will go down this hall, just here, then you are turning

left, down the long hall, then there is a door that leads—away? Non, outside,” she corrects herself. “You are walking straight

across, there is main registration.”

“Thanks,” I choke out, already hurrying away.

Down the hall—left—down the long hall, which is so long I start to worry I’ve lost my way.

But, no—there’s the door that leads outside.

I emerge onto a sunny sidewalk. Across the road is the entrance to another building, with a bright red sign that says “URGENCES.”

Someone honks as I sprint across the road and through the doors. The air conditioning is bitterly cold after the heat outside,

and the waiting room is filled with people, some of them looking pale and sickly, others red-faced and impatient.

At the registration desk, one of those red-faced, impatient assholes is berating the clerk, who wears a thin, beleaguered

smile. I don’t understand a word of his rant, but I don’t have to. He’s being a dick about the wait, never mind the fact that

there are people here with actual emergencies.

The girl behind the desk purses her lips as the jackass finally stomps away, and yet after he’s gone, she gives me a patient

smile and gestures me forward. She says something in French, too quickly for me to understand.

“Er—Anglais?” I say awkwardly.

“Oui, a little,” she says, still smiling kindly. There’s a line forming behind me now, but she looks me right in the eye,

as though she’ll wait as long as it takes to help. People like her don’t get paid enough, I think.

“I’m looking for someone who was brought in,” I say. I have to swallow twice on a paper-dry throat before I can spit out his

name. “Jacob Nichols.”

“Ah.” The girl types something into her computer and squints at the screen. When she looks back at me, there’s something terribly

pitying in her gaze. “And you are—friend? Famille?”

“Family,” I lie.

She nods. “He was in emergency, but he is transferred now, to USI. You take the elevator—là—to ninth floor. Press the bell and tell them who you look for.”

“USI,” I croak. “Is that—is that bad?”

Her eyes soften even more, and I think I might vomit. “It is—” She hunts for the words. “L’unité de soins intensifs. Intensive

care.”

Intensive care.

I don’t remember to thank her. I just stumble away, those two words ringing in my ears.

The elevator ride takes a year. There’s a middle-aged woman riding with me who asks me something in French and then looks

offended when I don’t answer. She gets off at the fifth floor with a little huff of irritation, and I ride the rest of the

way alone.

The doors open right into the intensive care waiting room. I don’t need to speak fluent French to know that’s what it is.

The walls are painted a depressing shade of gray, and everyone sitting in the expensive-looking chairs has the same pale,

tight look on their face. These people look just how I feel. Like they might fall apart at any moment.

At the far end of the room is a door with a buzzer next to it and a placard of complicated-looking instructions. I press the

buzzer and then wait, in perfect silence, for the door to open. No one in the waiting room looks at me or makes a sound. Just

like me, they live in bubbles. Nothing exists outside of their fear.

The door finally opens on a thin guy in pale blue scrubs.

“Oui? Est-ce que je peux vous aider?”

I clear my throat. Behind him, I can see a long row of glass-walled hospital rooms.

“I’m looking for Jacob Nichols,” I mumble. Trying to keep my voice down, even now.

“Vous êtes famille?”

I hesitate this time, but only for one heartbeat. “Yes.”

“Oui, entrez,” he says, waving me forward. “Salle neuf cent vingt-quatre.”

I follow him, moving on autopilot. “Is he okay?” I manage.

“He is not my patient,” the guy says, switching to accented English. “Voilà, c’est là.”

He points to a room up ahead and then hurries away. I stumble along a bit farther—I can see “924—neuf cent vingt-quatre” engraved

on one of the frosted glass doors just ahead. Time slows down as I walk forward. I can hear voices from inside. I can see

shadows moving.

The door is half open. Someone is crying inside, a woman. His mother, maybe? My heart thuds painfully. I’ve never met his

mother. She doesn’t know that I exist.

I step closer, and then I can see him.

My whole body goes numb. I have to clutch the doorframe to stay upright.

I had hoped—

I had thought—

I know it’s stupid, but a small part of me still hoped he was one of the ones with minor injuries. I was expecting... I

don’t know. A split lip. A gash in his forehead. I was so stupid, I hadn’t even thought of broken bones.

He looks so, so much worse than I could’ve imagined.

One leg is casted and hanging from some medieval-looking contraption on the ceiling, and there’s a catheter draining bloody

urine into a bag, and another tube coming out of his chest. IVs are dripping fluid into both arms, and there’s a heart monitor

beeping over the bed, and another, bigger IV dripping stuff into his neck.

And... he isn’t breathing on his own. I’ve seen enough medical TV shows to know that’s a breathing tube sticking out of his mouth. There’s a bag attached to it, and tubes running into a massive machine on the side of the bed, and rhythmically, the bag inflates and deflates.

His face isn’t bruised or cut up, but that almost makes it worse, somehow. He looks so fragile. So breakable.

There’s a middle-aged woman with short blond hair sitting at his bedside, her face puffy from crying and one white-knuckled

hand pressed to her lips. A thin, middle-aged man stands behind her, clutching her shoulders. On the other side of the bed,

a brawny guy in his mid-thirties is talking on his cell phone, one hand pressed to his forehead.

“I don’t know—I don’t know , Lil, they haven’t come to talk to us yet. No, not since downstairs—”

His voice is tense and vaguely familiar. He must be Jacob’s older brother, Paul. He calls Jacob a couple of times a month.

He has a huge, booming voice that always comes through the phone like it’s on speaker. He’s a businessman of some sort, and

he’s always asking if Jacob has a girlfriend, or if he wants to be set up with one of his own girlfriend’s “hot friends.”

The girl on the other end of the phone must be Jacob’s older sister, Lily. I’ve seen pictures of her. She’s twenty-seven,

with dirty blond hair just like Jacob’s. She works as an event planner somewhere in America, always frantically busy with

a hundred different weddings and bar mitzvahs and things. She only calls Jacob about once a month, but when she does, she

keeps him on the phone for hours.

His family’s like that. All of them, thick as thieves. No drama. No secrets.

No secrets except me, I mean.

I stand there stupidly until they catch sight of me. For a moment, their eyes light up, like they think I’m the doctor. Then they see my jeans and T-shirt, and their faces drop.

“Can we help you?” Jacob’s father says in a tight voice.

It takes me a second to push out an answer. I can’t think, with Jacob lying there. All he has on is some stupid hospital gown.

He’ll be so cold. He’s always cold. Irrational fury clenches my chest. Why haven’t they put any blankets on him?

“I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I’m... he’s a friend of mine. From racing.”

Jacob’s dad nods, but honestly, I’m not sure if any of them have even heard me. They’re staring at Jacob again, just like

me.

Then Paul looks at me, his phone still clutched to his ear. “No, it’s not the doctor,” he says impatiently. “I don’t know , Lil.”

He stares at me again, his mouth twisting down, and I just know he’s going to ask me to leave. But before he can, the heart

monitor starts going off.

I can’t understand any of it, there are so many numbers and lines, but the thing’s definitely going off, and there’s some

sort of alert flashing on the screen. About two seconds later, I’m edged out of the doorway by a nurse, this one tall and

female. She goes straight to the monitor and pushes a button. The machine starts spitting out a long strip of paper, and the

beeping stops but the flashing alert doesn’t go away.

“What’s happening?” Jacob’s mom asks.

“His heart rate is a little fast, that’s all.” The nurse’s English is flawless and her tone is calm, but there’s something

in her eyes that makes me sick to my stomach. The machine starts beeping again, and Jacob’s mom rises out of her seat. The

nurse turns to the machine again and shuts the beeping off, but this time, when she turns back, the worry in her eyes is obvious.

“I’ll be right back with the doctor. If you would like to go to the waiting room?”

“We’ll stay right here,” Paul says loudly. “We’re his family.”

The nurse nods and hurries from the room, and this time, when Jacob’s family looks at me, there’s something beneath their

grief—something like hostility. I am an intruder in this deeply private moment.

I choke out an apology and fall back out of the way just as the nurse returns with an older woman wearing dress clothes and

a stethoscope. There are two other nurses following close behind, and as they enter the room, the heart monitor starts going

off again. The door slides shut and I’m left standing in the empty hall.

They only want family inside.

I’m the one who woke up next to him this morning. I’m the one who made him his coffee. I’m the one who wished him luck on

his race, the one who kissed him and tried to work up the nerve to tell him I love him before chickening out for the hundredth

time.

But I’m not family.

And so, while he dies behind frosted glass walls, I lock myself in the first bathroom I can find and cry until I’m sick.