Page 105 of Still Yours
Stone nods, his stare remaining vacant. Somewhere else. “She’s talking to the orthopedic surgeon.”
Surgeon.My stomach plummets.
“I’ll track them down and get answers.” I turn to the doors, but Stone’s voice stops me.
“Thank you, Lavender. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I give him my profile, lowering my chin in a half nod. “I’d do more if I could.”
Stone doesn’t answer. He folds his arm, an intimidating tower in a sea of hunched, worried people in the waiting room.
I know him, though.
No matter what I say, he’ll blame himself.
Dr. Silver and the orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Patel, give me the answers I need, none of them good.
I return to Stone in the waiting room. He’s wide awake despite the early hour, staring off at nothing.
As soon as he spots me, he jerks upright.
“She’ll need hip surgery.” I communicate the bad news as best I can, and as fast as I can. “But you knew that since Dr. Silver consulted with a surgeon. The problem is your mom’s ability to handle anesthesia. Her immune system’s compromised. In this situation, it’s good she hasn’t restarted chemo yet, but with the way she is now, there’s about a fifty-fifty chance she’ll pull through.”
Stone swallows. “And if we choose not to do the surgery?”
I work my jaw back and forth. “It wouldn’t be good. She’d be in a lot of pain. The doctors are talking to your mom shortly. You can go on back and see her.”
“Have you seen her?”
I shake my head.
In answer, Stone holds out his hand. And he says the three words I dreamed he would say when I rewrote our past and had him stay ten years ago.
“I need you.”
His fingers intertwine with mine when I take his hand, and we both walk to Mrs. Stalinski’s room together.
She’s sitting upright in her private hospital room (probably a demand of Stone’s), her eyes closed with purple bruising underneath. A thin blanket covers her. If we hadn’t been told she’d fractured her hip, I’d think she was comfortably resting after a doctor’s checkup. There isn’t much to wrap a hip in, other than to keep it as still as possible.
Stone walks up to one side of her bed. I go on the other, careful of the morphine drip hanging on an IV stand, the button close to Mrs. Stalinski’s slack hand.
“They have her on a lot of drugs,” Stone observes when his mother doesn’t twitch as he takes her hand.
“The best pain meds available,” I assure him. “She doesn’t feel a thing.”
Stone cups his mother’s hand in both of his own. Then he drops his head and cries.
I go to him, rounding the bed and twisting him to face me, though he resists. Stone hates crying. He always has. To him, it’s a weakness he will never give someone else to wield against him.
But it’s me.
“Stone. Stone, Stone …” I repeat his name in soft bursts, each a beckoning call, until he folds into me, his tears coating the side of my neck.
I reach up, hugging as much of his broad frame as I can and holding on tight. My hands span his back, his bones and tendons rippling with agony as he moans into my skin.
“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s a nothing statement, but that’s okay, because nothing helps in this situation. Nobody can make it better.
It’s at that moment the two doctors come in, their faces grim.
