Not now.
Not when she felt so wrong. “Where’s my baby?”
Another time—any other time—she would have applauded the way they attempted to keep a straight face. To hide what they were truly feeling, but now, it only made her fear heighten. Her breaths became more shallow as she touched a hand to her stomach.
The more aware she became, the more she recognized that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
It was hard to think with whatever drugs were in her system—they made it hard to concentrate on any one thing—but it was easy enough to focus on what was right in front of her.
“Let me grab the doctor,” Katherine said softly before she slipped out of the room, leaving them alone.
“Isla, why aren’t you saying anything?”
Was it weird that it had felt like years since she’d last seen her sister without makeup? Karina wasn’t sure why she was noticing this now, but her scrambled thoughts seemed to latch onto this little fact and wouldn’t let go.
Grief, her mind supplied for her a moment later. It was only during moments of profound grief did she ever shed that layer she wore as some sort of protection.
“Isla, why aren’t you saying anything?” she asked, losing her patience.
But maybe she didn’t know.
Maybe no one had told her anything, including the doctor their mother had gone to find.
Maybe she had only just arrived.
Only when Karina attempted to swing her legs off the bed and stand did Isla finally snap out of whatever fog she was in as she darted forward and laid a restraining hand on Karina’s shoulder, gently pushing her back down.
“Just say something—anything. You’re scaring me.”
Isla opened her mouth as if she was readying to speak, but just as quickly, her eyes filled with tears, her trembling hand coming up to cover her mouth.
Before Karina could decipher what that meant, Katherine was back with a man in tow, a pair of wire-framed glasses resting around his neck. He had the sort of blank expression that came from working in a hospital for many years. And that thought had her clutching the sheet she was still tucked under until her knuckles blanched and her fingers hurt.
“Hello, Karina. I’m—”
“Where’s Poppy?” she asked without preamble, not caring even a little what the man’s name was or what her vitals might be that were written on the chart in his hand. She didn’t care. When he didn’t answer immediately, her control splintered. “Where is she?!”
He cleared his throat almost violently before his expression shifted in a way that made her stomach pitch.
That made her feel like all the blood was rushing to her ears and drowning out everything around her. Karina didn’t realize her chest was heaving with the force of her breaths before Isla was there, wrapping her hand around hers and squeezing tight.
“Your wounds were extensive. The bullet that entered your side ruptured an artery, and because of it, we had to do an emergency C-section in an attempt to save you and the baby.”
Attempt to save you and the baby.
Attempt to save the baby …
Attempt to save the baby …
“But she’s fine now?” Karina asked, looking past him, waiting for the moment when a nurse or someone would bring Poppy in bundled in a small, soft pink blanket.
When she could finally hold her in her arms after waiting and hoping and expecting for so long.
When she could tell her how much she loved her for the very first time.
The doctor didn’t respond, his gaze flickering to Katherine.
“Right?” Karina stressed, her voice cracking at the end as it felt like her throat was closing up. “She’s fine, isn’t she?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“My due date isn’t for another two months, I know,” Karina said in a rush. “But I don’t care what the cost is, give her the best care. Is that what you need now? A signature on some forms or a credit card.”
Her purse.
That was what she needed. To pay them. To make sure that they didn’t slack in any way.
“Darling,” Katherine whispered, her voice sounding so unbelievably sad Karina tried to close her eyes against it.
To pretend it wasn’t there.
That they didn’t mean it.
That none of this was real.
“I’m sorry,” she said so softly, Karina almost didn’t hear her. “I’m so sorry.”
Something broke inside her.
Something fragile and new and foreign.
It broke so quickly, Karina wasn’t prepared for the pain of it. The way it made her chest seize up, and her lungs stop working at all. To make a cry of anguish pierce the air that it sounded impossibly loud to her own ears.
Her heart ...
It didn’t break … it shattered.
People were speaking all around her.
Isla whispering apologies as a tear rolled down her face. Katherine issuing threats at the doctor. Someone else was yelling for help.
Karina could hardly hear them over the sound of her own grief—over the acute pain that felt like it was cracking open her chest. Distantly, she could hear the way she sobbed and cried.
Begging for something that could never be.
It was too soon. Nearly seven months and she was sure she had never loved anyone as much as she’d loved her.
Poppy.
Her Poppy.
A name she would never be able to give her because she was snatched away before she could ever be.
A life she would never get to love and nurture and watch grow old.
A daughter she would never get to share with the man she loved.
“Someone sedate her,” Isla finally snapped, though she never released her hold on Karina’s hand.
Not as she wailed and tried to pull away.
Not when she grabbed fists of her own hair hoping—needing to feel like she wasn’t dying inside even as she was.
New voices joined the old ones, a soft, sympathetic one coming from Karina’s left. She couldn’t see them or what they were doing next to her IV, but she didn’t particularly care either.
“It’s going to be okay,” Isla whispered, her own sadness reflected in her voice. “I promise. It’s all going to be alright. You have me, I promise. I’m here.”
She was still speaking even as a fiery sensation shot up Karina’s hand and up her arm, but even that was nothing compared to what she felt in her chest. But as the sensation dulled and a weight settled over her, she knew one thing for certain.
Nothing would ever be okay again.
39
Something to Find
Was this what it felt like to die while still living?
It certainly felt that way.
Otherwise, wouldn’t she have been able to sit up and move around on her own without feeling as if every step would be her last—as if her legs would crumple beneath her weight? Wouldn’t she care that she had been moved from one hospital to a privately funded one where she was given her own suite? Where there were nurses on round-the-clock care, making sure she had everything she wasn’t asking for anyway.
She didn’t care that her wounds were healing, including the stitches down the length of her stomach, or that she was alive and breathing.
None of it mattered.
None of it made a difference because Poppy was still gone.
Before she’d ever been able to hold her and see what she looked like. Whether she would have her hair or Uilleam’s … who she would favor more.
Karina didn’t bother wiping the tear that fell as that thought crossed her mind. The pillow was already damp beneath her cheek, so a few more wouldn’t hurt. She hardly felt it anyway.
Isla had finally ventured off some minutes before, going down to the cafeteria to find anything she might be willing to try. Not that she really understood the point. Even when she was hungry and forced herself to eat more than a couple of bites of anything, it all came up eventual
ly. And feeling those stitches as she hunched over a wastebasket only made the nausea worse.
But she couldn’t bring herself to care.
It was merely a cycle she would have to repeat for a while until … well, she wasn’t quite sure when.
Not that it mattered.
Nothing really mattered anymore.
“Darling, it’s terribly dark in this room.”
Katherine’s voice made her squeeze her eyes shut, to pretend as if she were still asleep and her mother would give her some much-needed alone time. She wanted only to float on the abyss and forget the world around her.
But as Mother shoved open the curtains and bright sunlight spilled into the room, Karina flinched away from it, turning in the opposite direction. It didn’t seem fair as her wounds still ached, and she’d lost the one person who had stolen her heart so effortlessly that the sun would still come up the next morning.
That its glow made her ache, but to her, it didn’t shine the same.
It would never shine the same again.
She closed her eyes again, wishing she could wield herself to sleep like she had when she’d been sedated. When the dreams had always been right there at her fingertips, and she didn’t need to worry about pain.
Sleep protected her from that.
But as more days passed and the drugs waned, she couldn’t sleep the way she used to, so she was forced to be awake.
To remember everything.
To suffer in every waking moment during every waking hour around the clock.
She almost asked for the morphine again.
“It’s good to see you awake, darling,” she said affectionately, darting forward to fluff her hair.
As if she truly cared about what she looked like at the moment.
“I’m ready to leave,” she said simply, proud she had managed that much without choking up.
“Of course. Your sister is on her way. I thought you’d enjoy having her with you.”
She would, if only because Isla was willing to let there be silence between them. Let her bask in the pit she had no intention of climbing her way out of.
“Thank you.”
Karina carefully climbed out of bed, mentally running the steps of what it would take to get dressed. Shedding her clothes and leaving them in a neat pile on the floor. Slide the new shirt over her head and the pants up her legs.
Left arm first, right arm next, then adjusting the hem of her shirt.
Socks and jeans.
Sneakers.
A rubber band left abandoned on the table next to her bed was used to tie her hair up.
She felt detached from everything—even her own body.
“Oh darling, why don’t you smile? You’ll feel better.”
She couldn’t think of a single time in all of her existence when someone had told her to smile, and she immediately felt better.
And it especially wouldn’t now.
“Could I have a minute alone?” she asked, gesturing around the sparse room. “I need to get my things together.”
“Of course. I’ll go find your doctor.”
With Katherine gone again, she was thankful for the silence.
It was easier not to think.
To just go through the motions of what she needed to do and be done with it.
“At the very least, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve brought your favorite coffee,” Isla announced as she walked into the room, carrying two cups. “The swill they serve here is dreadful.”
A startled laugh escaped her. “Only you would complain about the coffee.”
“Someone has to be honest here. You’re too kind to say it.” She handed her drink over before perching on the arm of the chair where Karina’s bag was resting. “Has Mother already been in?”
“She went off to find one of my doctors.”
“Just as well. She can get annoying in her efforts to make you feel better.”
“Which is why you’re my favorite.”
“I’m glad to be someone’s,” she said with a laugh.
Karina glanced up as the nurse entered the room, pushing in a wheelchair. She tried and failed to muster a smile she didn’t feel.
“Oh, no thank you. I can walk fine,” she said even as she thought back to the other morning when she couldn’t bring herself to even climb out the bed.
The woman smiled gently, the expression appearing genuine. Karina envied her that.
“It’s standard practice for women still recovering from—”
“Don’t mind her,” Isla interrupted as she swept into the room. “She’s still healing, and it makes her irritable. She absolutely hates getting doted over.”
The answer seemed to satisfy the nurse, but Karina didn’t bother correcting her sister. It would take too much work. Too much thought.
Too much everything.
But she was thankful all the same for her interrupting because though it had already been a couple of weeks, she still wasn’t ready to process and unpack everything that had happened.
If anything, she was fully embracing the numbness.
With one final glance around the hospital room to make sure she had everything, Karina wrapped herself in a sweater, then grabbed a pair of oversized opaque sunglasses and slid them on.
She didn’t care that they were still inside the building and some might think her pretentious.
It was too bright.
While she had been lost in her own thoughts, the nurse had slipped out of the room, leaving them alone for the first time since Isla arrived.
She risked a glance at her sister and immediately regretted it. “No.”
Any other time, it might have been comical that it was Isla with such a serious but sympathetic expression on her face and not the other way around.
“You’re going to have to sit, Karina. It’s—”
“Don’t say it’s procedure,” she cut in quickly. “I just … I don’t need it. As you and everyone else can see, I’m walking just fine.”
Her expression didn’t change.
That was the thing about Isla. She didn’t lose her patience the way others did so frequently.
And Karina was thankful for it, more so than she even realized herself as she stood on the other side of the room, fisting the blanket she’d been wrapped in for the better part of two weeks.
She’d known, in some capacity, she was walking the edge, and if she wasn’t careful, she would tip over and lose herself.
But she couldn’t adequately express the storm brewing inside her at the sight of that chair—at what it was supposed to represent.
How many TV shows and movies had she watched where the woman was wheeled out of the hospital by the nurse as the doting father or relative went out to fetch the car.
All the while, she would be holding a tiny bundle nested in a soft blanket, sleeping peacefully.
For a moment, it felt as if all the air in the room had slowly been sucked out as that thought blossomed and bloomed.
“You have to calm down,” Isla whispered gently, her hands feeling heavy on top of hers. “I don’t want to see you get sedated again.”
Karina didn’t remember much of that day, though she did have brief flashes here and there. Like the overwhelming panic she’d felt as she struggled to breathe—to make sense of everything that was happening around her even as deep down she knew.
And then … nothing.
Just thinking back on it had her heart stuttering in her chest and her hands feeling clammy, but she stuffed those feelings back down before they could take her over.
“I’m fine,” she said, then again once more until it sounded something like the truth.
“You underwent surgery,” Isla went on gently. “You were shot and lost a tremendous amount of blood.”
Karina met her gaze, finding everything she wanted to know—and all the things she didn’t—reflected there. If she needed something else to focus on, Isla would go along with it, but they both had to play their parts.
Carefully, she crossed the floor, putting one foot in front of the other until she slowly lowered herself into the chair, gripping her bag tight on her lap.
And as the world carried on around her, she tried not to think about everything she had lost.
From the moment she had slipped into the back of the chauffeured car, Karina had settled in the back seat, resting her face against the cool glass of the window and closed her eyes.
Isla rode in silence beside her, though she had, for a moment, heard the ping of a text coming in before she, Karina assumed, muted her phone.
She hadn’t considered, during her stay at both hospitals, what would come next. It didn’t matter that she was physically fine despite getting shot, and even the scars those bullets would leave behind didn’t entirely bother her.
It was everything else.
For nearly twenty-two years, she had either known what she wanted to be or who her mother was trying to mold her into, but now? Now, she had nothing.
Less than that even.
She didn’t know who she was anymore.
The car slowed as it turned down a winding driveway. Finally, Karina opened her eyes long enough to focus on her surroundings—the lush green of freshly mown grass and the dusky color of the cobblestone the car rode over.
“Where are we?” she asked, not recognizing anything about the fast-approaching residence.
“One of Mother’s New York residences. She thought you might enjoy staying here for the time being instead of getting on a jet and flying home so soon.”
She hadn’t been wrong in her assumption.
Too many people called Ashworth Hall home for her to be comfortable there. She wanted to be alone.
“We’re two hours outside of the city,” Isla added, surprising her.
She hadn’t realized they’d been riding that long, but she wasn’t complaining. It was rather calming to know that she was so far away from everything else, and as far as she could tell, the nearest neighbor, if there was one, was at least a couple of miles away.
The car rolled to a stop in front of the wrought-iron gate. She couldn’t see clearly from where she sat, but she was sure she watched the driver reach out the window and punch in a code on the electric keypad before the gates finally swung open and allowed them inside.
White Rabbit Page 36
