Chapter 41

Chapter 41

We waited all night for the hospital to release me. Heath climbed into the narrow bed, and it felt like we were sixteen again, holding each other in my childhood room.

The doctors told me not to go to sleep, but I couldn’t have anyway. Everything hurt too much. I had a concussion—from the first fall or the second, they couldn’t be sure. The gash on my palm took ten stitches to close, the wound on my leg even more. I would have scars.

Finally, sometime around daybreak, they told me I could go.

I had to leave in a wheelchair. As Heath pushed me through the lobby, there was a flash like lightning. Then another. Then a whole storm.

Reporters, gathered outside the hospital entrance. Pressed up against the glass like tourists at the zoo. It took me a second to realize they were there for us.

Heath swore under his breath and steered back the way we’d come. “There has to be another exit we can use,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

He left me sitting by the elevator bank, staring at my distorted reflection in the dented stainless-steel doors. My hair was a wreck, a nest of curls standing out on one side of my skull, the other side flattened from being pillowed against Heath’s chest for hours. My eyeshadow and mascara had blurred into a gray murk around my eyes. My posture was slumped and careless, shoulders bowed under my wrinkled warm-up jacket.

I looked like a mess. But I also looked like myself, for the first time in a long time—raw and wild instead of pretty and refined. I looked like the fearless girl who used to ramble all over the lakefront with Heath, skinned knees and windblown hair and dirt under my nails.

I’d tried so hard to become the perfect skater, the perfect partner for Garrett. The next Sheila Lin. And where were the Lins now? As far as I knew, they hadn’t come to the hospital to check on me. Hadn’t even sent flowers. They weren’t there for me when I truly needed them. They weren’t my family.

Heath was.

He came hurrying back, like he’d promised. “They’re going to let us leave through the ambulance bay in the back,” he told me. “A taxi can meet us over there.”

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Of course.” He pivoted the wheelchair toward our escape route. “When we stop off at the hotel to get our luggage, I’ll call the airline, and—”

“No.” I twisted to look up at him. “ Home. ”