Page 48 of The Perfect Illusion

As quickly as she could under the circumstances, she stepped over to the head of the bed, grabbed a pillow, yanked off its floral-patterned pillowcase before tightly wrapping it around her arm, tying it off with her left hand and her teeth.

Then she left the bedroom, choosing not to look back. She returned back down the hallway the same way she’d come. When she got to the steep, narrow, hidden staircase, she slid into a crouch, then made her way down it on her backside, taking one stair at a time. In the distance, she thought she could hear sirens.

When she reached the bottom, she pushed herself up with just her left hand and stumbled around the corner, past the half wall, and into the living room. Brady had moved Amanda from the chair to the floor, where she was lying on her back. He was pressing a small sofa pillow into the wound on her right side, trying to stem the flow of blood, which was seeping through.

“How’s she doing?” Jessie asked, her voice dry.

Brady looked up at her, and his eyes filled with horror.

“What happened?” he gasped.

Jessie moved over to the chair that Amanda had been tied to and plopped down onto it.

“Long story,” she muttered before nodding at Amanda. “Is she still alive?”

“Just barely,” Brady said, starting to get up.

“No,” Jessie instructed. “Stay with her. I was only sliced once. She has it far worse.”

“You look like you suffered a lot more than just a knife wound, Jessie,” he said, apparently trying to sound calm but unable to keep the concern out of his tone.

Jessie sighed.

“I did slam my neck and back a little.”

“What about your head?” he asked. “You’re bleeding from your temple.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I had a little run-in with a door.”

Jessie saw Brady's face contort from concern into all-out fear. She wanted to ask him why, but before she could, her skull seemed to split open in pain. Lights flashed before her eyes. She felt herself losing her balance.

And as the lights stopped flashing and her vision cleared, she noticed that the living room floor seemed to be rushing up to meet her face.

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

Jessie kept blinking, hoping the act would remove the fuzziness from both her eyes and her brain.

“Ryan’s on his way,” said Brady, who was sitting in an uncomfortable-looking chair beside her hospital bed. “We’re at UCLA Medical Center and even using his car’s siren, he’s battling rush hour traffic coming from downtown.”

“I’m fine,” she said, her hoarse voice betraying her.

“Let’s let the doctor decide that,” he replied. “I’m pretty sure you got concussed. And we both know how bad that is.”

Jessie pushed the thought out of her head. She couldn’t deal with the prospect of another recurrence of Second Impact Syndrome, the potentially deadly condition that had essentially paused her life for several months late last year. What would they even call it: Third Impact Syndrome? Rather than focus on that possibility, she turned her attention elsewhere.

“How is Amanda Calloway?” she asked.

Brady paused before answering, as if he wanted to continue the prior conversation. But then he seemed to get that she wasn’t up for dealing with her own situation at the moment, so he relented.

“It was touch and go there for a while. She lost a lot of blood," he said. "And that knife wound to her side punctured her intestine. She's in surgery now, but they think she's going to pull through."

Jessie allowed herself a moment of relief before glancing down at her right arm, which was wrapped in a bandage. She had no recollection of that being done.

“How long was I out?” she asked.

“Fully unconscious?” he said. “About ten minutes. The EMTs were able to wake you up pretty quick, but between your injuries and the pain meds they gave you, this is the first time you’ve been coherent in about an hour.”

“That’s not long enough for major arm surgery,” she noted.

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