Page 73 of Pretend for Me

I inhaled and smelled Audrey’s perfume. Holden must have set me down on the bench because Audrey engulfed me in a hug.

“Aud.” I cried into my best friend’s shoulder, gulping while clutching her shirt for dear life.

Audrey stroked my hair. “Oh God,” she muttered.

“Mrs. Adams.”

A hand gently shook my shoulder. “Cassie.”

As I became more alert, I recognized the second voice. Audrey. I opened my eyes and found Audrey and Dr. Torres towering over me, concern written all over both of their faces.

I shot up off the uncomfortable hospital waiting room couch. How had I fallen asleep while Matthew’s fate was still up in the air?

I had almost forgotten how I’d lied to the hospital staff about being Matthew’s wife so that I could get information about his condition. Now all I longed for was to have time to make that sentiment true.

I cursed myself and stood up, feeling my stomach roil and my vision blur from the sudden movement.

This was it. Whatever the outcome, I needed to know.

38

MATTHEW

Voices. I heard voices while lying on the operating table.

“He’s losing a lot of blood,” a scrub nurse muttered, handing Dr. Torres a clamp to tie off one of the vessels.

“Get me two bags of O-negative stat,” Dr. Torres spat, changing instruments.

“He’s crashing.”

“Get a crash cart!”

“Areyou sure you want those words as the engraving?” The jeweler eyed me, a young naive boy.

I nodded, never more sure of anything. Even at sixteen years old.

The shop owner sighed and followed orders.

I knew marriage was a big commitment, but there was nobody who I would want to share that bond with but Cassie. I saw it all with Cassie. Marriage. A house. A family.

Family.

Something she was never privileged to, at least not really. Not when she needed them most.

I vowed to give her the family she so desperately deserved.

But for now, I would give her this locket in celebration of her art competition, and on her eighteenth birthday, I would tell her to open it and we’d have even more to celebrate.

A roar filledmy ears and my body felt weightless. The sounds of machines beeping echoed through the crowded room. Bodies moved this way and that. The lack of awareness plagued me, and I felt trapped inside my body. My mind drifted as I tried to regain consciousness.

A pieceof me died when Cassie ran out into traffic that night. I knew things would never be the same once I saw her locket on the floor of my car.

It had been a promise of a future that now we would never have. A family.

The official start of us.

If only my timing was better. But that wasn’t right. No, timing had nothing to do with it.

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