Page 11 of Look, Don't Touch

“Aah.” A true-blue first and unrequited love. The worst kind.

“What happened to Blakely McAllister?”

“My brother broke her heart.” There’s something in that. His gravelly undertone borders on malice.

“A cheating scandal?”

“No.” The easy innocence is gone.

I think for a moment. “Seventeen, eighteen. Senior year. Different college plans?”

“They both planned to go to Harvard. They even planned the same campus preview day. My parents were supposed to drive them since hers were on vacation. Only she got the flu and couldn’t go.” He pauses for just a moment. “It saved her life.”

My spine turns to ice.

“The autopsy showed the driver of the rig had a massive aneurysm. He slumped onto the wheel dead and took my family with him.”

“Fucking hell.” I should have canceled when I had the chance. I’m breaking protocol left and right. I can’t react to that news. Not like that. It won’t help him.

“Yes, it was the start of fucking hell.” He grunts. “Funny enough, I got my wish.”

My blood stills in my veins, waiting for him to complete the thought. Surely, he hadn’t wanted his family to die. Right? If he had, he wouldn’t be the first. His family sounded great. A damn dream you never want to wake from, only he’d woken to a nightmare. Right?

“Blakely McAllister hugged me and kissed my cheek. Of course, that was after we sobbed together at the side of my family’s graves.”

I manage to keep my blood pumping and my mouth shut, allowing him to continue. He’s done, though. Why wouldn’t he be? He just shared his fucking trauma. And I’m not sure that’s all of it.

I’m pretty sure it’s not.

The death of your parents is a lot, but when not at the scene, when given a stable foundation, it shouldn’t make someone withdraw from physical contact.

“Did you keep in touch with Blakely McAllister?”

“We talked once a week on Sundays, even after I…” He trails off, and I don’t push. “She was the only bright part of my life for a while. The thing I clung to until she moved into her dorm at Harvard. Her calls became less regular. The hope she’d maintain slowly bled out. Then a few months into her freshman year, she died. Overdose. That’s what they said. I’m pretty sure it was a broken heart.”

Poor fucking kid. He’d lost everything and the only stable beacon in his life after extinguishing her light. “Did you withdraw because of her death?”

“No.”

My phone vibrates with an incoming call. I hadn’t realized it slid toward the front of the chair. It hits against the metal frame at the arm and creates a ruckus that jolts through me, and Mr. Judge too, I’m sure of it.

I snatch up the phone, and the noise quiets. My face burns. “I’m so sorry.”

After a stunned beat, I look at my phone, and after several more, I register the number calling. It’s the hospital. The psych ward. The suicide watch. I shouldn’t answer. I’m not going to. But Matt might need me.

“I have a patient…”

Before I can finish speaking or decide whether to answer, the call dies.

The notifications from earlier appear on the screen.

One is a text from an acquaintance who is a nurse on the floor, telling me to call her as soon as I can.

The other notification is from the app for my patients’ portal.

Matthew Banett: Patient Discharge Orders, Death

Something inside me dies too.

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