Page 87 of Back To You

Phone calls in the middle of the night are never a good thing.

I wake up to my phone buzzing on my nightstand, Annie’s naked body pressed up against mine.

I’m usually a pretty heavy sleeper—I haven’t had trouble sleeping through the night since all the renovations started and how tired I am by the time my head hits the pillow—but for some reason, the quiet buzzing of my phone pulled me from my deep sleep.

It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I reach for my phone and see it’s just past one in the morning, and I have two missed calls from Caleb.

My mind begins to spin with why he would be calling me in the middle of the night, but I don’t have much time to think about it because a third call from him comes in.

“Caleb?” I whisper into the phone, my voice groggy. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Bennett.”

***

Last time I was in a hospital, it was when Lennon was born. It was a happy, exciting night that ended with meeting my niece and seeing two of my best friends become parents.

Tonight isn’t that.

And I don’t think I ever want to be in a hospital ever again.

Hospitals are meant to save lives, even bring new lives into the world. They’re meant to fix people and make them better.

But tonight, it’s where the ambulance brought my brother so the doctors could declare him dead.

I feel Annie’s arms around me as the doctors tell me and Caleb what happened to Bennett when he and his crew were responding to a house fire. She keeps me grounded as I hear that Bennett went back in, against orders, because a mother thought her young daughter was still inside.

I listen to Caleb’s muffled cries next to me as the doctor tells us that the house collapsed with Bennett still inside, slowly dying of asphyxiation, external trauma, andthird-degree burns. Jack tried to run in after him, but he was held back by members of their crew.

There was nothing the doctors could do to save my brother after the fire was put out and he was found buried under the debris.

My own tears finally fall when I hear that the daughter was never inside, that her brother got her out.

My knees go weak, and I collapse onto the ground, Annie not being able to hold my weight up as I feel my whole world crumble around me.

Bennett.

The brother who taught me that life doesn’t have to be so serious all the time, that there’s always a bright side of things, that going through life worried and afraid is no way to live.

The boy who didn’t look at me differently when he learned we didn’t have the same dad, the teenager who became more of a parent than my own parents ever did, the man who taught me—whoshowedme—what kind of man I wanted to be.

He’s gone.

And the last conversation I had with him was about a stupid coffee bar.

I feel a set of arms pull me up and help me walk over to the chairs that line the waiting room we’re in. I don’t have to open my eyes or see through my tears to know it’s Emmett. It’s his silence I recognize as he holds onto me before setting me down in a chair.

Annie sits down beside me, and I let my body fall onto hers, my head falling into her lap. I feel her fingers tenderly graze the side of my face, wiping my tears and pushing my hair out of my eyes as my fists clench around her sweatshirt.

The familiar voices around me drown out as I cry into her lap.

Chapter 35

Annie

Why do such bad things happen to the world’s greatest people?

Why would the universe take away Bennett for doing his job?

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