Page 18 of The Woman with the Target on her Back (Grassi Family)

“Can I help you?” the nurse standing at the station a few feet from the elevator, but before the door leading to the unit, asked.

“I, ah, I’m Traveler. My father, James Moon, is here,” I said, the words feeling strange coming out of my mouth.

My father.

In the ICU.

My father, a man I’d never seen have so much as a cold, was in a coma in a bed in the intensive care unit.

The nurse rattled off the same things I’d heard on the phone, then led me into the unit where I was given one of those paper onesie things, gloves, and a mask, and allowed inside my father’s room.

“Talk to him,” the nurse encouraged, then left me to go inside by myself.

I paused, taking a deep breath, then forced my feet forward.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

The first time I saw my father in over a year, and he had tubes sticking out of him.

I pushed back those thoughts, knowing they were a little selfish. This wasn’t about me and my discomfort. This was about my father.

I always heard people say that hospital beds made their loved ones look small. That wasn’t the case for my father. James Moon had always been an impressive figure of a man. Tall, solid, with broad shoulders that echoed back to his high school and college football days.

As in all things, my father has always been fastidious about his appearance, dedicated to hitting the gym five days a week, no excuses. It didn’t matter that he was well into his fifties, he was still strong and muscled enough that I could see the outlines of some of said muscles even in his blue and white hospital gown.

I’d never seen much of myself in his features. I always had the softer face that came from my mom, while my father had a wider, chiseled jaw, a strong forehead, stern brows, and a nose that was slightly crooked from getting broken twice in high school.

Never could keep my hands off of girls who already had boyfriends, he would joke. Which always caused me inevitably to clap back,Yeah, that was exactly the problem.

But that was baggage to be unpacked another day.

The thing was, I couldn’t even make out my father’s features anymore. His entire face was swollen with bruises—black, blue, purple—smattering every inch of skin.

His nose was splinted. Broken again, I figured.

And his lip was split badly enough to require stitches.

It would scar.

If he woke up.

My heart squeezed in my chest at that thought.

No, we weren’t close.

But I was accustomed to having him around. And a part of me kind of liked the idea of there being a chance for us to finally work through shit.

Him dying would ruin any chances of mending things.

“Ah, hey,” I said, feeling like I was talking to myself. “Um… the nurse said I should talk to you,” I said, moving the chair closer to the bed, and sitting down, suddenly feeling almost impossibly tired. “I guess they think you can hear me. But it sounds like you’re pretty drugged up.”

My gaze slid to his monitor, watching his steady heartbeat, his oxygen level which controlled, seeing as they had him intubated.

“I guess they’ll have you on a feeding tube too,” I mused aloud. “You’re still going to waste away if you’re kept under for a long time,” I added, figuring if he could hear me, knowing that his perfectly maintained physique slipping away from him might give him the motivation to heal and fight.

“Who did this to you? I thought you had this town locked down tight. Nothing and no one has ever touched you. What went wrong?” I asked. “They came for me tonight too,” I added. “They ruined my shop. And my car. I had to hide in the oven and call the fuckingmafiato come save me. I’m never going to forgive you for making me deal with that asshole August over this,” I added.

Though, I had to admit, he’d been pretty nice to me when I’d been all freaked out. Picking me up and carrying me to the car. I’d never been picked up by a man before. You could say I tended to have… trust issues when it came to guys. If a guy tried to pick me up, he’d probably get sucker-punched in the ribs.

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