Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 108242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
“Maxim.” For a moment, it’s only my name, but spoken in a voice I’ve never heard from my father. Torn. Ragged. Lost.
“What’s wrong? Is it Mom?”
“No, your mother… She’s here with me.”
“Where’s here? What’s going on?”
“We’re flying to Baltimore. There’s been an accident at the fundraiser.”
“Nix?” Her name is out before anything or anyone else occurs to me.
“She’s fine, from what I’ve gathered. It’s… It’s Owen.”
I bite my tongue, not wanting to ask the question burning the tip of it—the question my father’s sober tone begs. And, from my father’s silence, he doesn’t want to answer.
“What about O?”
“He’s gone.”
There’s a wail in the background, a wounded animal with my mother’s voice. The moment retards, slows, stretched by her pain, like a drawn-out note in the octave of anguish. It doesn’t fall on me all at once, the impact of what my father said. Not like a brick or a boulder, something heavy and flattening in one blow. It’s a deluge of pebbles, embedding themselves in my flesh one by one, second by agonizing second, until I’m covered. I can’t move. I can’t speak. Hurt is my only faculty.
“Maxim?” my father asks, with a hint of his typical command. “Did you hear me?”
“Gone,” I say dazedly. “Y-you said Owen’s gone… Jesus.”
In my seat, I bend at the waist and hold the phone away from my ear, letting it fall to the floor. I can’t find my bearings in a world where my brother doesn’t exist. I’ve never been here before. The pain is tornadic, picking up speed, tossing out everything I knew about how something could hurt. There is no point of reference for this. The reality of Owen being gone travels through me, miles per second, and nothing is left untouched.
“Maxim,” I hear my father again, a distant echo. “Son, talk to me.”
Without opening my eyes, I feel around on the floor until I find the phone and lift it to my ear. “I’m here.” That’s not my voice, grated up with sobs, but it’s coming from my body. “I’m… I’m trying to… Shit.”
Words abandon me, and I sit in silence for a moment with my father, and when he speaks, his voice is hoarse and emotion cracks it, and he says the words that I’ve often wanted to hear, but not like this. Never like this.
“Son, just come home.”
CHAPTER 26
LENNIX
There is no colder place than a waiting room when the waiting is over.
When hope turns off the lights. The held breath is released in tears. The end of faith. It all convenes in a waiting room when death has come and gone.
Millie sits on the hospital’s drab, impersonal couch, dry-eyed and lost in her own apocalypse. This is the end of the world as she knows it. I’m inches away in the blast wave of her pain, feeling the shock of it and still seeing the burning vehicle that took her husband. My friend. Maxim’s brother.
Oh, God, Maxim.
The police pulled Bob and me in for questioning right away, to reconstruct the timeline as best we could. In all the commotion, I left my evening bag and phone in the SUV. I haven’t been able to call Maxim, and I need to hear his voice. I want to be there for him, but also…I need him. Nothing settles me like being in his arms, and I’m short-circuiting at how close I came to death…again.
I was supposed to be in that car with Owen.
If I hadn’t caught a ride with Millie, I would have been.
Is death hounding me?
I haven’t had time to process the implications of what could have happened to me because I’m too unraveled by what did happen to Owen; his family, suffering this unfathomable loss. Then I think about the country and the hope and enthusiasm Owen had inspired. Young people wanting to vote for the first time, older voters who had lost faith in the process, eager and wondering if maybe this time…
It’s so hard to compartmentalize right now, but I have to remember I’m a friend but also running the country’s most closely followed political campaign. Kimba and our team are flying blind right now. I need to call her, but first I have to call Maxim.
I glance at the woman seated across from me, one slim arm wrapped around Millie’s shoulder. Salina Pérez, her best friend, lives in the Virginia suburbs outside DC and was Millie’s first call. She arrived a half hour ago in a whisper of cashmere and Dior perfume, ushering in some degree of calm and comfort in the waiting room.
“Um, could I borrow your phone?” I ask softly, nodding toward the phone on her lap. “I think I left mine in…” It feels wrong to even refer to that scene, to that moment Millie and I witnessed.
“Of course.” Her dark, kind eyes are slightly puffy and red-rimmed, but it doesn’t detract from her dusky beauty. She hands me the phone. “I’m sure you have many things to take care of. I’ve got Mill until the family arrives.”