~~~~~ Emery’s Pov ~~~~~
Sleep never came.
I lay there for what felt like an hour, staring at that same narrow strip of streetlight stretching across my wall.
The two messages replayed on a loop behind my closed eyes, no matter how many times I tried to force my mind toward something else.
Eventually, I gave up entirely, throwing the blanket off and pushing myself out of bed, deciding a shower might do what sheer willpower couldn’t.
The bathroom tile was cold beneath my bare feet as I turned the water on, waiting for it to heat up.
My reflection in the mirror looked about as exhausted as I felt—hollow-eyed, pale, nothing like the version of myself who had been laughing with Calloway just hours earlier.
Steam began curling around the edges of the mirror, fogging my reflection into something softer, less exact, and I stepped beneath the water once it finally ran warm, letting it work at the tension sitting stubbornly across my shoulders, trying, and mostly failing, not to think about the warning still waiting on my phone on the nightstand.
*Stay away from Calloway Marchetti.*
I tried.
I really did.
But the words followed me anyway, threading through every other thought, refusing to dissolve the way I’d hoped the hot water might make them.
I pressed my palms flat against the tile and let my head hang forward, the water running down the back of my neck, and counted my breaths the way I’d been doing all night.
In for four, hold for four, out for four.
The trick was starting to feel less like a calming technique and more like a lifeline I kept returning to whenever the day became too heavy to carry all at once.
I stayed beneath the spray longer than necessary, until my fingertips had started to wrinkle, before finally shutting off the water and stepping out, wrapping a towel around myself.
I walked back to my room, my hair dripping slightly as I dried it with a smaller towel.
I pulled a pair of pajamas from my wardrobe and dressed quickly in the cool night air before finally stepping back into the hallway, my hair still damp and unbrushed.
My mother had already gone back to her room, her door pulled mostly shut, a thin strip of darkness beneath it telling me the lights were off.
I made my way toward the kitchen instead, thinking maybe warm milk or tea might finally coax some sleep into showing up, when I heard it.
A cough.
I stopped mid-step, listening carefully, telling myself it was probably nothing.
Just an ordinary cough, the kind everyone had sometimes in the middle of the night.
But it didn’t stop.
It kept going, one cough rolling into the next without any real pause between them, rougher and more labored than anything ordinary should have sounded.
Every hair on my arms stood up at once.
I turned and ran back down the hall, my bare feet slapping against the floor as I pushed my mother’s door open without knocking.
“Mom!”
She was sitting upright in bed, one hand pressed against her chest, her whole body curling forward with the force of each cough, breathing hard and ragged between them.
“Mom.” I crossed the room in three strides and dropped into a crouch beside her bed, my hands finding her shoulders, her face—anything I could actually touch to reassure myself she was still there, still present, still fighting for air in front of me.
“Mom, are you alright?”
She looked up at me, her eyes watering from the effort of coughing, her breath coming in short, uneven pulls.
“I’m fine, Emery,” she managed, though the words came out thin and strained, nothing about her tone matching the reassurance she was trying to offer.
“You’re not.” My voice cracked on the two words, panic rising fast and cold through my chest as I watched her struggle to draw a full breath, her lips looking paler than they should have, even in the dim light of her bedside lamp. Read the latest chapters at novelping(.)com.
“Mom, you’re not fine.
I can hear you.
Please—”
I couldn’t stand there watching this happen.
I couldn’t stand feeling this useless while my mother fought for air three feet away from me.
I bolted back to my room, grabbing my phone off the nightstand with hands that had started shaking again, and dialed Priya’s number before I’d even fully processed what I was going to say.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
“Priya, please pick up,” I whispered under my breath, pacing the small stretch of floor beside my bed, my mother’s coughing still audible through the wall separating our rooms.
It rang three full times before she finally answered, her voice thick and disoriented with sleep.
“Emery?”
“My mom is really sick,” I said, my voice breaking on the words, all the careful composure I’d managed all evening finally giving out completely.
“She’s coughing, and she can’t catch her breath, and I don’t know what to do, Priya.
I don’t know what’s happening—”
Whatever sleepiness had still been clinging to her voice vanished instantly.
“What?
Okay—okay, hold on.
Stay with your mom.
I’m calling Jordan right now.
She has a car.
We’ll come get both of you and take your mom to the hospital.
Just stay with her.
Don’t hang up if you don’t have to.
I’ll call you back the second I’m off.”
“Okay,” I said, my voice barely holding steady.
“Please hurry.”
“We’re coming.
I promise.”
The call ended, and I stood there for a second, staring at the dark screen, my heart still slamming against my ribs, before shaking myself back into motion.
Down the hall, another round of coughing started up again, rougher this time, and the sound of it sent me moving faster than I thought my legs were capable of.
I yanked my pajamas off and pulled on the first real clothes my hands found.
Leggings, an old sweatshirt, socks, then shoved my feet into my sneakers.
On the way, I grabbed my mother’s jacket from the hook beside her door, some distant, practical part of my brain already thinking ahead to the cold outside, to whatever waiting room we’d soon be sitting in.
“Mom, I’m here,” I said, dropping back down beside her bed.
I rubbed slow circles over her back the way she’d done for me a thousand times over the years—through fevers, nightmares, and every moment I’d needed someone steady beside me.
“Priya and Jordan are coming.
We’re going to get you checked out, okay?
Just breathe.
Just try to breathe slowly for me.”
She nodded weakly, still fighting for air between each word, one trembling hand gripping mine tightly enough that I could feel her pulse racing beneath my fingers—too fast, too erratic for something as simple as exhaustion or a bad cold.
“I don’t want to be a bother,” she managed between coughs, and something in my chest cracked wide open at the sheer, stubborn selflessness of it.
Even now, even like this, she was still worried about being a burden instead of about her own labored breathing.
“You are never a bother,” I said fiercely, my own eyes stinging now, matching hers.
“You’re my mom.
Let me take care of you for once.
Please.”
She didn’t argue further, which frightened me more than anything else so far.
My mother, who never stopped moving, never stopped working, never let herself be taken care of without a fight, was finally too exhausted to protest.
I thought, uselessly, about every night she’d sat up with me through fevers and nightmares, every meal she’d skipped so I wouldn’t have to, every quiet sacrifice she’d made without ever asking for anything in return, and felt something fierce and protective settle over the fear still coiled tight in my chest.
Whatever this was, however bad it turned out to be, I wasn’t going anywhere.
My phone buzzed against the mattress beside us.
I picked it up and glanced down.
It was Jordan this time, a single text glowing brightly in the dim room.
*Jordan: Outside in 10.
Be ready.*
I squeezed my mother’s hand once, tightly, and glanced toward the window, watching for headlights, counting down the longest ten minutes of my entire life.
My mother’s coughing had eased slightly, settling into something quieter but no less alarming, her breathing still shallow and quick, her grip on my hand never once loosening.
I kept my voice low and steady, talking about nothing in particular—the diner, Calloway, anything that might distract either of us from the minutes crawling past until, finally, headlights swept across the ceiling of her room as Jordan’s car pulled up outside exactly when she had promised.
“They’re here,” I said, relief and fear colliding in my chest as I helped my mother to her feet, wrapping her jacket around her shoulders with hands that had finally, mostly, stopped shaking.
“Come on, Mom.
We’re going to get you help.”
She let me guide her toward the door, leaning into me more than she probably wanted to admit.
For the first time in my life, I was grateful my mother didn’t have the strength left to argue.