Page 95 of Forever Flames: Padraig & Stevie
A phone call?
“Stevie, Cooper died at the scene.” My father looks me in the eye to deliver the news.
Something splinters behind my ribs.
“No,” I say like somehow my words have time-reversing power. “No, no. He was driving. He always drives.”
My voice gets louder. The monitor beside me spikes again. My leg tries to move and pain tears through it.
“He—he would’ve gotten them safe. He always checks the seats. He’s—he’s—” My eyes flick back and forth between them.
“He tried.” My mom’s now crying, a sound I haven’t heard in years. “The paramedics said he shielded the kids. He turned into the slide. He saved them.”
A howl tears through my throat, raw and animal.
Everything else stops.
My body, my breath—gone.
The only thing left is the image, painted across my mind in grotesque, cinematic horror. Cooper’s hands on the wheel. The sudden lurch. The kids screaming. His instinct to protect. To save.
To take the impact.
Tears burn down the sides of my face and disappear into the bandages wrapping my face.
My mom leans over me, pressing her forehead to my shoulder like she can absorb the pain. I want to scream at her. I want to crawl out of my skin. I want to take it back. Rewind five minutes, five hours, five years.
He was my safe bet. The one who wouldn’t leave me. We were supposed to grow old together. Fight about dumb shit and laugh about dumber shit and make it to gray hair and college graduations and grandbabies.
Instead, I’m lying in a hospital bed and he’s—he’s in a fucking morgue?
How is this possible?
I don’t ask what hit us or how or who. It doesn’t matter.
The father of my children is gone.
He didn’t deserve this.
It should have been me.
twenty-seven
Padraig
A Few Days Later
TheglasswallsofIsis Management gleam in the late-afternoon light.
Sun streaks across the polished floor like it’s performing for us.
Liam lounges on the leather couch, boots kicked up, his usual restlessness surprisingly absent. Across from him, Linus pacesin the steady, surgical way he does when he’s building toward something. Even in a room full of noise, Linus commands it without ever raising his voice.
Even more so now than back when we were in college.
Our singer, Avonna Parilla, balances on the edge of the credenza with easy grace, until you remember she’s the reason crowds go feral. Sandy-brown waves tumble past her shoulders, eyes sharp as knives even in her quiet observation. She looks deceptively sweet, but she’s got a scorching internal fire.
Onstage, she’s fucking immortal.
