Page 34 of Unearthed Dreams (Sable Point #3)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

KAI

The ER doors slammed against the wall as I burst through them, my heart thundering against my ribs. The fluorescent lights and antiseptic smell hit me, but I barely noticed. Only one thing mattered.

“Where is she?”

Elliot blocked the hallway, his expression confused. “Kai? What are you doing here?”

“Where. Is. She.” Each word came out like broken glass.

“Who—”

“CHARLIE!” Her name tore from my throat, desperate and raw.

The confusion on his face transformed into something dangerous as understanding dawned. His eyes narrowed, jaw clenching as he took a menacing step forward. “What the fuck did you just say?”

“Move.” My hands clenched into fists. Every muscle in my body screamed to force my way past him .

“Why are you asking about my sister?” Another step. The threat in his voice was unmistakable now.

“Because I love her.” The words exploded from my chest before I could stop them. “Now get the fuck out of my way or?—”

“Or what?” Elliot’s face had gone dark with rage. “You gonna tell me what you’ve been doing with my baby sister?”

“Elliot.” Tessa’s voice cut through the tension. She laid a gentle hand on her husband’s arm. “Look at him.”

I realized I was shaking, my breath coming in ragged gasps. “Please.” The word scraped my throat raw. “I can’t... I can’t lose her too. Not like this. Not like—” Kelsey. Billy.

“Room three,” Natalie said softly beside Jasper, who looked equally confused, scared, livid. “Down the hall.”

I didn’t hesitate, didn’t explain. Didn’t care.

Elliot’s hand shot out as I moved past him, gripping my bicep hard enough to bruise. “This isn’t over.”

I met his eyes steadily. “No, it’s not. But right now? The only thing that matters is her.”

He released me with a sharp nod.

Swift steps carried me across the squeaky linoleum floors toward the woman I loved, the woman I needed. The woman I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in was safe and whole.

I grasped the handle and pushed the door open.

Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay.

Charlie’s eyes were closed, her whole body still. She had a tube down her throat, wires extending from every section of her body.

“No.” The denial slipped from my throat the same time a single tear fell down my cheek .

Jay Everton was sitting vigil at his daughter’s bedside, but the single word from my mouth had his head snapping up.

“Kai?”

His wife turned her head to look at me from her side of Charlie’s bed, eyes puffy and red. “Hi, dear,” she said with a small smile. “Jay, honey, why don’t you let Kai take a seat?”

“Huh?”

She shot him a look. I imagined it was one of those knowing mom looks, but what did I know? I never really had a mom to know things.

Properly chastised by just a look from his wife, Jay rose from his seat and rounded the end of the bed, coming to stand behind Emma.

I stayed firmly rooted in place. I couldn’t move. Could hardly breathe. This whole scene was too fucking familiar. First, with Kelsey, then with Billy. I couldn’t watch another person I loved die.

“Sit, Kai.”

My eyes snapped from Charlie’s face to her mother’s.

Their features were so similar—all except their eyes.

Emma had the same amber color Jasper did, unlike the blue of the rest of the family.

Otherwise, the same. It physically ached to look at her, eyes open, mouth moving.

I needed Charlie to look at me, to speak to me.

I moved to the opposite side of the bed and grasped Charlie’s small hand in mine. It was cold, lifeless, but the monitor behind me beeped in a steady rhythm. I bent my head, resting in on our joined hands.

And then came the tears came in earnest. A broken sob escaped me, and then another.

I couldn’t hold it in anymore. The dam had broken, and it was too much.

It was all too fucking much and without the one person who brought me peace, who brought me light, everything felt so fucking dark. So dark and miserable and unbearable.

“We’ll give you a minute,” Emma said before leaving the room.

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed or how many tears I’d cried, but when the only sounds in the room were the machines keeping my heart alive, when the well inside me had run dry, a gentle hand squeezed my shoulder.

When I looked up, Dr. Elena Stone stood over me, her own eyes red and glossy.

“Hey, Kai.”

“Chase?”

“He’s in the next room. A little banged up and bruised, but he got lucky.”

I nodded. It’s all I could do unless I wanted to curse the fucking world at how unfair that shit was. Chase, lying in the next room with a few bruises while his sister lay here unconscious and hooked up to machines.

“They need to take Charlie for an MRI.”

“Can I go with her?”

“I’m sorry, you can’t.”

I nodded again, but rose after kissing the back of my girl’s hand.

“Chase. ”

He opened his eyes and jerked in his hospital bed, wincing at the sudden movement.

Good .

“Kai, I’m?—”

“No.”

He swallowed and tears welled in his eyes.

“You are done.”

“With… life? You here to take me out, man? ‘Cause you’d be doing me a favor.” His head fell back against his pillow.

“You are done with the drinking, done with the drugs.”

“Kai, man, I don’t?—”

“I will help you, but it ends today.”

Chase nodded, staring at the ceiling.

“I don’t know how.”

I pulled up a chair next to his bed.

“I met my wife when I was thirteen.”

Chase’s head whipped in my direction, eyes wide, no doubt thinking a married man was fucking his little sister.

“She died two years ago. In a motorcycle accident.”

Chase muttered a curse, closing his eyes and turning his face toward the fluorescent lights of his room. I knew he was listening, though, and I was actually grateful not to have his eyes on me as I spilled my truths.

“A year before that, she got pregnant, but we were both too drunk and too high to do anything right.

She had a miscarriage and it just… it did something to me, shook something loose inside me and I knew right then and there that I was done.

Found myself a facility and checked in. Twelve weeks later, I was all dried out and had my head on relatively straight—or as st raight as it can get for a guy who grew up in foster care with no real family other than the only woman he had ever loved.

“When I got back, Kelsey—my wife—she was so far gone, more strung out than I’d ever seen her.

I tried—fuck, I tried—but nothing I said or did got through to her.

When I wouldn’t join in on her ‘fun’ or give her drug money, she called me boring .

Started fucking around, banging sleazeballs in the bathrooms of bars just to do a line off the toilet seat.

“It got so fuckin’ ugly, man. But she was my wife, ya know? What was I supposed to do? She was the only person I had. She’d been the only person I had for decades. I wanted so badly to help her, to save her from herself, but I just couldn’t get through to her.

“Then, two summers ago, she got on the back of some dude’s motorcycle.

They were both drunk as fuck and high as kites.

The driver blew through a red light, and they were t-boned by an oncoming car.

He died on impact. A wife and three kids at home with another on the way.

Kelsey was life-flighted to the hospital but by the time they got there, there just wasn’t anything else they could do. She died a few hours later.

“And that’s how I ended up in Sable Point. Billy was Kelsey’s dad. They hardly knew each other, but I’d met him once before, and knew I needed to come tell him in person. I came, and I never left. When I realized his memory was failing him, I decided then and there that I wouldn’t fail him, too.”

I cleared my throat, bracing myself for this next part.

“Your sister is everything Kelsey wasn’t. She is kind and selfless, quiet and sweet. She brings me a peace I didn’t know existed, and I love her more than life itself. I know it from the outside it looks all wrong, but nothing has ever been more right. She is it for me.”

By the time I finished, Chase met my eyes again. We were both crying, two grown-ass men weeping in a hospital over all the shitty things in the world.

Movement from the doorway caught my eye. Elliot stood there, wiping his eyes.

“I didn’t know,” was all he said. I wasn’t sure which part he was referring to—maybe all of it. He took a few steps into the room, sitting on the opposite side of Chase’s bed.

The brothers’ eyes met, but when Elliot spoke, it was to me. “Where was this facility you checked into?”

“Petoskey,” I said. “Harbor Hall.”

“As soon as you’re discharged.”

Chase nodded at his brother, who clasped a hand around the back of his neck and brought their foreheads together.

I took that as my cue to leave, giving them some time to do their twin thing, whatever that was.

When I made my way back to the waiting room, the entire Everton clan was huddled close together, with a few additions to the crew.

Marie Choi, Natalie’s mom. Andy, Elliot’s best friend and a local cop. Rosie.

This town showed up for its people.

It’d been weeks, and nothing.

Five weeks since I’d seen those blue eyes sparkle with mischief.

Thirty-seven days since I’d heard her voice whisper my name.

Eight hundred and ninety-two hours of sitting beside her hospital bed, watching machines breathe for her while doctors talked about intracranial pressure and traumatic brain injuries.

The induced coma was necessary. Giving her brain time to heal. But each day stretched longer than the last, marked only by shift changes and Emma’s quiet updates about Charlie’s vital signs.

I’d memorized every freckle scattered across her nose, traced the curve of her cheek with my eyes so many times I could draw it from memory. The steady beep of monitors had become my heartbeat, my only reassurance that somewhere inside that still form, my Charlie was fighting to come back to me.