Page 12 of Fall Into Me

I stormed into the apartment Fane and I shared in a panic. Tears blurred my vision with nothing on my mind but this painful, aching need to get home. Every tether I had to sanity slowly snapping at the idea that I was losing hours, minutes, seconds with my mom.

“Calista.” Fane’s voice had been strong, just like the hands that held my face. That clutched me to a hard, familiar chest that continued to resound with the steady thumps of his heartbeat.

I’d never given much thought to heartbeats before, but right then, I was terrified that I hadn’t been paying close enough attention to his. That I hadn’t been marking them down and remembering them in case one day I ever had to live without them.

“Baby, you’ve got to tell me what’s wrong or else I can’t fix it.” Fane had always been calm in situations where I’d only ever been able to feel panic. He was well-balanced. Thoughtful. He was unwavering. A lighthouse amid a raging storm.

“My mom,” I croaked out, unable to see him clearly through the heavy onslaught of tears. “She’s sick. We have to go home. Fane, my dad—” My voice broke, and he held me while the sobs racked my body. I didn’t even try to pull it together. I knew that this would be my one and only chance to break down because I would do everything I could to do for my dad what Fane did for me.

Keep steady.

And that’s when my whole world shattered. All it took was a single second and one word.

“No. Cali…I can’t.”

I almost missed them. I think I wanted to miss them, but I’d heard those words leave his mouth and had enough respect for myself that I didn’t ask him to repeat them. I remembered stepping out of his hold, turning around, and closing the door to our room.

Something snapped inside me. I didn’t understand the how or why or what. I didn’t even remember packing. I refused to look at him when I walked out on silent feet, setting my key to our first and only apartment on the kitchen island as I left.

I picked up Jerry on my way back to Darling, and he didn’t make a peep for the whole five-hour drive. Not even when my hand held onto his fur with maybe a little too much force.

He just looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew that it could take some time, but we were going to save one another.

I groaned into the fur of his stomach. “I hallucinated a man today. Theworstman.” Jerry’s tail stopped wagging, and he eyed me with the perfect amount of wariness. The look wasmade entirely more dramatic on account of his face being held down by gravity and the whites of his eyes on full display.

“Oh, don’t you worry. You won’t ever have to meet him,” I patted his stomach. “But I think it might be karma for accidentally crushing Mrs. Antinello’s tulips when I tripped over them yesterday.” I looked up to gauge my dog’s silent opinion, mostly because he had been the one to nudge me directly into the flower bed.

Jerry had fallen back asleep at some point between his concerned stare and my admission of unintentional vandalism.

“Holy shit, I need to stop waiting for him to reply,” I mumbled to myself. Doing my best to get up without jostling the couch too much and waking him up.

It was five forty-five p.m., and hallucinations or not, I wasn’t going to have my ass handed to me by the infamous Isla Grey for being late to a dinner date.

Now that she was better, she was even more passionate about being on time.

Mom’s treatment had been brutal and fast-paced. From the moment she was given her diagnosis to her tests and biopsies, through to her treatment plan, and then to the decision she made to get a double mastectomy.

She’d faced it all with this unfaltering determination and grace that I was so in awe of. I didn’t know how she did it, but I’d never been so proud to be her daughter as I was watching her go through one of the most harrowing things I think you can watch someone you love endure.

She did six months of chemo, and in April of last year, she was officially declared to be in remission. Though the road was long and so much of her life still revolved around hospital visits and medication, I’d seen so much of the woman she’d been before come back to life in the last twelve months that it was hard not to cry every time I saw her.

That included her fiery disposition regarding tardiness.

My parents lived in the same house that I’d grown up in. A beautiful, older-style farmhouse that had been renovated slowly and consistently over a couple of decades so that nothing was ever new at the same time. It had baby-blue shutters and a porch that wrapped all around the outside.

The moment you looked at it, it made you feel like you could take a deep breath.

At least, it used to.

I couldn’t look at this house without my chest tightening. Without being gripped by the looming presence of a grief that hadn’t descended but lingered on the outskirts of my sanity, ready to consume me at any moment.

“Mom! Dad!” I called before I even closed the car door behind me. It was exactly twelve minutes past six and I would be damned if I was clocking in a moment later.

“Cali girl!” I could hear my mom’s sing-song voice trickle out of the kitchen through the open front door. The house already smelled amazing, and my stomach chose that moment to rumble, reminding me that I hadn’t remembered to eat lunch…again.

Being wrapped in a hug from my mother turned me into a little girl again. She was warm and soft, and everything that haunted me outside of her embrace had no standing whatsoever when she slowly rocked me from side to side. I was enveloped in notes of bergamot and lemon, of jasmine and lilies.

“My big girl,” she whispered into my hair, placing a kiss on my temple.

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