Page 38 of Wired Ghost

“I’m covered with cuts and bruises, too.” Sophie pushed up her sleeves, showed her black-and-blue, scratched arms. “But it’s true that Jake took more damage than I did. He tried to protect me.” She met the woman’s hard stare. “I love Jake. We had just gotten reunited. I’m devastated that this happened to him.”

“Then why did you bring him out to this godforsaken island in the middle of an eruption to do this job?” Mrs. Dunn shrieked. “I wish it were you in there on the bed!”

“I’m so sorry.” Sophie covered her face with her hands. Tears filled her eyes. “I wish it were me, too,” she whispered.

“Mother!” Patty grabbed her mother’s wrists. “That’s enough!”

But there was no stopping the hateful words that spewed from the woman’s mouth. “Felicia was so much better for him. Sophie’s a whore! Having a baby with another guy while she was with Jake. Then getting him shot . . . andnowthis!”

Sophie turned and fled.

She took the stairs down out of the hospital, even though the ICU was eight flights up. Her injured lungs burned and her sobs were harsh in the echoing concrete stairwell as her feet, in new athletic shoes, hurried down and down and down. She could barely see where she was going, but somehow, she made it to the bottom without falling, banging out through the exit into an alley reeking with bagged garbage from the hospital’s cafeteria.

Sophie dashed the tears away. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt up, put her head down, and walked along the sidewalk, heading toward the ocean. She wanted to hear the sound of the sea, smell it. Breathe it. Something briny and clean.

How could tragedy have struck the one she loved a third time? First, grieving through Connor’s fake death. Then, Alika losing an arm in a bomb blast. Hurting again when Jake broke up with her, and now—when they’d found each other again, when they’d been so close they could have been one flesh—he was in a coma with possible brain damage? Jake would rather be gone from this world than be brain dead.

And the job of pulling the plug, of making that terrible decision, was going to fall to his angry, bitter, grieving mother. Sophie had no rights to him whatsoever.

She’d been dealt more emotional pain than any one human should have to stand.

Sophie could have retrieved her father’s rental car, but she needed to move. She exited the hospital parking lot with its decorative plantings. Heading downhill toward the curve of Hilo Bay, she could smell an occasional whiff of the ocean. She wanted to run, but her lungs were still too damaged to tolerate heavy exercise. Just walking was making her cough.

Her phone buzzed and rang in her pocket. She picked up. “Hello?”

“Sophie, it’s Marcella.”

“Oh, Marcella.” Fresh tears. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I heard about Jake. It’s the worst, darling, the worst. Where are you?”

Sophie looked around. She was on the main thoroughfare that ran from Hilo Bay to the hospital, which was located up at the top of the town near Rainbow Falls. A light sprinkle cooled her hot cheeks. Cars whisked by. “Walking. Somewhere in Hilo.”

“I’m still on Oahu, but I’m trying to get time off to come see you.”

The rain increased to a heavy shower and Sophie hurried toward the banyans around Hilo Bay. “Please don’t. I can’t handle people being nice to me right now. Jake’s mother was hateful, and it—felt right somehow. I should have died, too.”

“Survivor guilt. You gotta talk to Dr. Wilson.”

“I don’t have to do anything but put one foot in front of the other.” Sophie reached the first of the series of immense banyans that bordered Hilo Bay. Gray and huge as the legs of elephants, the trees rose high overhead and blocked the rain with their thick, rubber-like leaves. She stopped underneath the natural umbrella and shut her eyes. “I think I will wander around for a while. But everywhere I look . . .” She glanced around, choked down a sob. “I see places where we spent time together. We ran and played with the dogs almost every day here in the park when we lived in Hilo. We breakfasted at that restaurant over there.” She pointed, as if Marcella could see. “It’s like he’s already dead, and his ghost is haunting me.”

“Oh, Sophie. Gah, I hate this so much. Where are you staying?”

“With my dad. At the Hilo Hilton.”

“I’m on my way,” Marcella said.

Sophie slid her phone back into her pocket and kept walking.

She went to the waterfront, out onto the jetty that protruded from the park and ran alongside the river. Little old Japanese men lined the outer edges, fishing, as they had for all the years she’d taken a walk there.

If only she could turn back time. Instead of accepting Jake’s choice to break up with her and go away with Felicia, she’d have fought it. Tried to win him back. He’d always loved her, even then.She could have won him back.

But she’d been hurt too, and absorbed with her new baby, and she’d let him go . . . And they’d lost all that time. Time they could have been together, forging a life.

Sophie stood at the end of the jetty, and watched the wind ruffle over the bay, felt its fingers in her hair. She sat down, cross-legged, on the sun-warmed stone, shut her eyes, and focused on the painful act of breathing.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

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