He walked past Hunter and Carmen, nodding at his daughter reassuringly as he mouthed, It won’t take too long, just before he stepped out of the dining room.
His words did nothing to calm Carmen down, though. She’d been there several times when her father was paged, and the calls usually lasted for at least thirteen minutes or so because he was always being asked to hold the line ’till he connected with whichever nurse had sent the alert.
“Go on then.” Aunt Beatrix nodded towards Carmen’s plate, her tone not unfriendly. “Eat. You heard your father. He’s not going anywhere.”
But Carmen’s appetite seemed to have vanished into thin air along with her ability to appear composed and unfazed.
“You know,” Cole began to say, leaning back in his chair comfortably and looking at Carmen for the first time that night. “If it does turn out to be something serious, he’s going to have to attend to his patient and leave you here.”
“I’ll leave with dad then,” Carmen said decisively, staring right back at him.
“Your house isn’t even on the way to the hospital,” he pointed out with a slight scoff. “Are you just going to linger around in the emergency unit, then?”
“If I have to, yes.”
Cole’s mouth twitched before pulling up into a cold smirk, reminding Carmen of that lunch period when Hunter had found her by the lockers and offered her that very same smirk before telling her that she was the one to blame for all his misfortunes. The lunch period when she’d hidden away in the art room where Asa had later found her.
Looking at Cole now and noticing that cold gesture Hunter himself had thrown her way time and time again made Carmen sick to the stomach.
Suddenly, it didn’t seem enough that Hunter was here with her. He’d put her through hell—through seven levels of it over and over and over again. Him being here just wasn’t enough.
And just like that, she felt rage start to bubble up in her veins. Because Hunter being here didn’t erase everything else he’d put her through.
“Your father’s doing a noble job, you know,” Cole said, the smirk never leaving his face. “He’s saving lives. If he has to go and save one tonight, then let him. Don’t you already have enough blood staining your hands, Carmen?”
The rage flew out through her fingertips, leaving her bloodstream and something much darker and bitter flowed through her instead. Carmen couldn’t name it, but it was turning her bones cold and cutting her chest open wide, leaving an empty, aching hole right there where her heart should’ve been. It was something that made flowers wilt and ripped the wings off butterflies and allowed frost to spread over souls.
The instant those words left Cole’s mouth, Carmen felt like she was dying. Except that she was still breathing which was somehow worse.
Someone else dropped something this time. Was it a fork? A spoon? A glass? It came from next to her. Perhaps it was Hunter. Maybe he dropped something. But Carmen was too still. Too frozen. She couldn’t make her muscles move. Couldn’t check for herself what and where the sound was.
Maybe it was just the shattering of what was left of her heart. Or the exploding of what little sanity she had left. She didn’t know. She didn’t know. She didn’t know.
She didn’t know anything but that her lungs were having trouble functioning and her heart was going to burst out of her ribcage in an excruciating manner. She didn’t know anything but the stabbing of a hundred needles behind her eyes.
Her ears seemed to have tuned out, not registering anything that was happening. But nothing was happening. There indeed was an eerie silence that had fallen among everyone in that room and Carmen was conscious enough to acknowledge it was that fleeting sense of quiet and calm before the storm truly began. Before it hit them and created havoc and left them with nothing but the remnants of what was once been.
But this was okay, she tried to reassure herself. This was okay. Because Carmen West had grown up with a storm raging inside her head the second she was born. It had created explosions in her head and burned down her hopes to ashes and tossed all her love to the wind—and she survived.
She survived almost eighteen years. And she’d survive tonight.
She wasn’t the kind of girl who ran away from the storm. She was Carmen goddamn West, the kind who had hurricanes named after her.
“Cole.” Aunt Beatrix began slowly, her hands shaking as she withdrew them from the tabletop and hid them on her lap, away from calculating eyes. “Let’s just try to have a peaceful dinner—”
Viola snorted, cutting through Beatrix’s voice obnoxiously and amplifying the tension in the air. “Peaceful,” she muttered sardonically. “Peaceful. You say that like this family is supposed to find peace with that—” Viola gestured with her hand in Carmen’s direction, not dignifying her with even a glance, “—that thing in this house. At our dinner table.”
Carmen’s eyes flickered towards the clock. Only two and a half minutes had passed since her father stepped out of the house. She still had a long way to go.
But it was okay. Because if she truly believed Asa was proof that morning came and took the nightmares with it, then Carmen perhaps should allow herself to believe that she was proof storms never lasted, and that the sky cleared once again for a brand new day.
So she sat back in her chair and took the hits and the blows. She wouldn’t defend
