Page 127 of The Unfinished Line

Seren ignored their mother. “Will she race by summer?”

Again, another clearing of the throat.

Dillon felt consciousness drifting from her, slipping through her fingers like the white sands of St. Barthélemy, her limbs warm—was it the Caribbean sun or the morphine?

She didn’t hear the doctor’s answer.

When she woke again, she was in a different room.

The writing on the whiteboard—patient name, nurse, care plan—had changed to English. There was a pastel mural painted on the wall by the door, colorful silhouettes of children playing netball.

Beside the bed a body was slumped in an armchair and despite the hospital blanket drawn to her ears, and the ball cap tipped down to block out the light, Dillon knew it was Kam.

She tried to sit up but found the action impossible as a torrent of pain flashed from the numbness of her toes to the scalding ache of her shoulders. Her involuntary gasp woke Kam, who sat up, blinking the room into focus.

“Hey.” She swept the hat off her head, unfurling her legs that had been tucked up beneath her. “You’re awake.”

“I think I’d rather not be.” Dillon closed her eyes. Something was pinning her left arm to her side. Her right leg felt immobilized. When she tried to draw a deeper breath, she found a new sensation of pain stabbing beneath her ribcage. “What time is it?” The last thing she remembered was staring up at the clock in Landungsbrücken. It had been seven-thirty.

“About ten.”

Dillon opened her eyes, verifying she’d seen light glowing around the edges of the drawn curtain. It couldn’t possibly have only been a few hours.

“How’d you get to Hamburg so fast?” Kam should have been in Beijing. She’d been at a promotional event in correlation with the trailer release for her second film.

“You’re back in England.” Kam stood, allowing the coarse hospital blanket to slip to the ground, and settled on the edge of Dillon’s bed. “Last night they transferred you to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London.”

Dillon wanted to close her eyes and reopen them. To find herself waking in the hours before the race. Anything to shake her free of this nightmare.

“What day is it?”

“Monday.”

Two days. The race had been Saturday morning.

“Who won?”

Kam didn’t answer.

“Elyna, then.” Dillon tried to suck in a deep breath but radiating pain immediately cut the action short. “And Alecia?”

“I don’t know.” Kam reached for her hand. “I’m sorry.”

The halogen lamps flickered on the ceiling. Above the headboard, a monitor ticked out the slow beat of her heart. On the whiteboard, in bubbly print, a nurse had written her name—Candice—with a smiley face.

“You didn’t have to come.”

“Of course I did!” Kam’s tone was sharp, her fingers tensing around Dillon’s. “I was on a plane before the ambulance had gotten you off the race course.”

“You’re so dramatic,” Dillon tried to smile, only to find her face hurt with the effort. She ran her tongue along her upper teeth, relieved to find she still had all of them. “I think I dreamt Seren was there?”

“She was. And your mom.”

For the first time since Dillon woke, a tendril of fear pierced through the numbness, settling uncomfortably in the pit of her stomach. “Looked that bad, did it?” Her voice wasn’t as light as she would have liked it, the question no longer feeling rhetorical.

“Itwasbad, Dillon.”

There was something about the way Kam said it.

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