The Complete Darkest Sunrise Series

by Aly Martinez

  Through it all, I couldn’t help but feel that warmth in my chest spiraling out of control, because for as much as I was laughing, so was Travis. He even stopped Tanner a time or two to correct the details of his uncle’s story. Clearly, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard them, and I loved the idea that he’d grown up with that feeling of warmth and belonging.

  Once we’d finished eating, the kids took off to the corn hole boards for a game, and during that time, we discussed Travis’s health in great detail. Lynn asked me at least a dozen questions, and Tanner and Tommy listened intently to my answers. Porter chimed in several times, but for the most part, he sat back, anchored his hand to my thigh, and let me brief his family.

  While I was sure Travis would have loved to swim with his little sister, excessive exercise wasn’t good for his heart. Something it seemed the Reese family not only knew, but had been mitigating for years. As soon as Hannah waded into the water, yelling for her father and Uncle Tan, Tommy took his grandson down to the dock on the opposite end of the pond to go fishing.

  I sat there for hours, watching everyone interact with each other. The smiles were smooth and effortless. And the love was beautiful and refreshing.

  Good people did exist. The Reese family was proof.

  And it stirred emotions inside me that left my mind reeling.

  “You’re still refusing to swim?” Porter asked as he sauntered over to me. His bathing suit—thankfully a pair of board shorts and not a pink Speedo—was dripping and his wet hair hung down over his forehead.

  “Did you see the size of the fish Travis caught a minute ago? I’m concerned its cousin the Loch Ness monster might show up for revenge at any minute.”

  He chuckled and sank onto the grassy bank beside me. “You doing okay over here?”

  “Yeah. Today was fun.”

  He looped his arms though mine and folded our hands together, resting them on his thigh. “I told you it would be.”

  Hannah’s laughter rang through the air as Tanner ducked under the water and pretended to be a shark.

  “Your family is crazy. I see where you get it from.”

  He scooted closer until our thighs were touching. “Is that why you’re over here, looking like you are on the verge of a panic attack?”

  I tore my gaze off my son, who was casting a line into the water at the other end of the pond. “What?”

  “Come on. Don’t bullshit me. You’ve been happy all day, and for the last thirty minutes, you’ve been sitting over here alone, staring up at the sky like you’re waiting for it to fall.”

  Wow. That was…surprisingly accurate.

  Though I wasn’t waiting for the sky to fall, I’d been trying to make heads or tails of how perfect it felt.

  Everything was too right. Too good. Too temporary.

  I didn’t get those things in life. Yet, right then, I had them all.

  And it scared the hell out of me.

  At my silence, his eyes flashed dark. “You want to talk about it?”

  “I can’t decide if we’re too real or not real enough,” I whispered.

  His body locked up tight. “Confessional?”

  “No,” I said. “Not here. Not tonight. Let’s just talk.”

  He cleared his throat and stared at me. “Then I’m going to tell you, first and foremost, there is no such thing as too real or not real enough. There’s just real. And there’s just us.”

  Guilt slashed through me. “I don’t mean for it to sound like that. I wasn’t talking about us. Well, not completely, anyway. It’s… Today was so great it almost made me uncomfortable. I’m starting to think I don’t know how to be happy. Is that, like, normal in a situation like this?”

  “Charlotte, there is nothing normal about us.”

  “Right. I know that. But are you happy?”

  “Today? Unquestionably.”

  “See, for me, it’s like I go through these spurts where I’m really happy, and then I realize I’m happy and it scares me because I’m well versed in how quickly that can be taken away.”

  “I get it, baby. We’ve lived through a lot of sour over the years. But this is the sweet. Remember when I told you I used to come here every year and get in the water, trying to figure out how to let go?”

  My chest tightened, but not a single word made it to my tongue, so I nodded.

  He pressed a kiss to my forehead, allowing his lips to linger for several beats. “One dip in that pond, knowing you were sitting on the bank, my boy down on the dock, fishing with his grandpa, my daughter playing with her grandmother and her uncle, and I didn’t just figure out how to let go—I felt the pain disappear.”

  “See, rational thought tells me that it’s impossible to find the energy to feed the pain and hate when you’re surrounded by so much goodness and love. And yet I can’t seem to relax. No matter how good it is. It’s like I’ve been programmed for the darkness and I’m lost in the light.”

  “Sweetheart,” he purred in understanding.

  I looked at the water. “I love this life. I’ve never been happier than I have been in the last week. I close my eyes at night, knowing when I open them you’re still going to be there. I still stress and worry about losing Travis, but it’s manageable with you. I, as a general rule, don’t like people.”

  He chuckled, but I wasn’t joking.

  “I don’t, Porter. But I love you. And I love that he loves you. And then, today, you bring me to meet your family.” I paused when the emotion of my confession became too much. But I refused to cry. Not anymore. “And don’t think I didn’t notice you calling me your girlfriend all day.” I laughed and it luckily kept the tears at bay. “But this all scares me so much.” I peered up into his blue eyes and asked the question I didn’t actually want to know the answer to. “I need to know the truth. I’ve been doing it for so long. I don’t even know what’s real anymore. Are we pretending here?”

  He grinned. “Are you pretending?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so or you aren’t?”

  “I…uh…” I stammered.

  He chuckled. “Charlotte, are you happy?”

  I swallowed hard. “Right this second? Yes. But what about—”

  He pinched my lips closed with his thumb and forefinger. “Stop with the buts and what-ifs. If you always expect to get kicked in the stomach, that’s all you’re ever going to get. There are going to be ups and downs, sweetheart. But you can’t let the lows color the highs. You had a good day today, right?”

  “Yesh,” I mumbled around his fingers.

  That damn sexy grin of his grew exponentially. “Good! Then enjoy it. Today, we have it all. And we fucking earned every second of that happiness.” One of his hands went under my legs and the other around my back.

  I draped my arm over his neck, assuming he was dragging me onto his lap.

  He didn’t.

  He rose to his feet with me in his arms.

  “You have to embrace the good times or the bad times will always overwhelm you. When you look back on this day, a year from now, I don’t want you to remember the last thirty minutes of fear. I want you to remember laughing and living in the light with people who love you.” A smirk tipped the side of his mouth. “And maybe swimming too.”

  My eyes flashed wide as he took a step toward the pond.

  “Porter, don’t!” I demanded, squirming in his arms. “There are fish in that pond.”

  “They aren’t piranhas though.” He laughed, and that sexy rat bastard just kept walking.

  “Please!” I squealed.

  “This is as real as life gets,” he said, stopping at the edge.

  “If you throw me in that water, you are going to wish you were pretending,” I snapped, but then I laughed when he started swinging me toward the pond. “Stop! I don’t have a change of clothes.” I cackled, clinging to his neck.

  “How do you feel right now, Charlotte?”

  “Like I’m going to k
ill you.”

  He laughed. “But you aren’t scared, are you?”

  “For your safety? Yes,” I shot back.

  “A year from now, you’ll remember this.”

  “From the inside of a prison cell!”

  “Say you love me,” he ordered.

  I glanced up and saw that everyone had stopped what they were doing and were now watching us as they smiled. “I love you!” I whisper-yelled. “Now, put me down.”

  He jerked like he was going to throw me. “Louder.”

  “Porter!” I hissed. “People are staring at us.” I squeaked when he faked me out again.

  “Louder.”

  “Fine. I love you!” I yelled, tucking my face in his neck as my cheeks flashed hot with embarrassment.

  “Good. Then you should have no problem forgiving me for this.”

  “No!” I yelled, but it was too late.

  He jumped into the water with me securely held against his chest.

  Laughing underwater, I tried desperately not to think of the possibility of a fish brushing my leg and, instead, focused on Porter.

  Maybe he was right. We’d been through hell. If ever there were two people who deserved a happily-ever-after, it was us. Happiness was a state of mind, not something you had to hold on to for fear you’d never get it back.

  But, for people like us, life wasn’t a case of sour and sweet.

  It was more like the deepest pits of despair and the high of cloud nine.

  And, as my head popped up out of that water, I knew I’d been wrong to ever assume I wasn’t still in that pit.

  * * *

  “Travis!” Dad yelled as I breached the surface, a smile splitting my mouth.

  The panicked tone of his voice shot through me like an arrow. Treading water, I spun in a circle as Charlotte emerged beside me.

  She laughed, oblivious. “I’m going to kill—”

  She was cut off by my mom’s terror-filled screams.

  “Get him! Tommy, get him!”

  “What the hell?” I breathed as my sixty-year-old father dove into the pond.

  My pulse spiked as my mind struggled to piece the situation together. I couldn’t see anything. But maybe that was the most telling of all. The dock, where my son had just been standing, was now completely empty.

  “Where’s Travis?” Charlotte asked beside me, her voice bearing the slightest of trembles.

  And then the world rushed to an immeasurable speed. Slingshotting my life into fast forward while I remained utterly still with no way to catch up.

  My dad’s hand shot out of the water, catching on the wood beam at the corner of the dock. My son’s lifeless body in his arms.

  “Help me!” he roared.

  Suddenly, my chest caught fire, and less than a second later, my body exploded.

  There had been exactly one other time in my life when I’d swung my arms that fast, kicked my legs that frantically, or prayed that hard.

  Time moved at an agonizing pace as I once again waged war with the water in that fucking pond. I couldn’t remember if I took a breath the entire way, but regardless, my lungs were on the verge of collapsing when I finally reached them. They were worthless to me anyway, because I died a thousand deaths at the sight of my son unconscious and unmoving in my father’s arms.

  “What the fuck happened?” I barked, wrapping Travis around the shoulders and pulling his back to my front. I bargained with any and every god that he would gasp for breath or start laughing that it was some sort of sick joke.

  But he was utterly still.

  “I…I don’t know,” Dad replied. “He was reeling a fish in and just collapsed into the water.”

  Charlotte finally appeared in the water in front of us. Her face was pale and her hands were shaking as she tried to check for a pulse. “He’s not breathing. We have to get him out of here. Now!”

  “I’m trying,” I replied, struggling to get his limp body up onto the dock, but it was too high for me to be able to lift him.

  The tiniest fraction of relief ruptured inside me when Tanner arrived on foot.

  “Give him to me!” he shouted, dropping to his stomach and hanging over the side.

  My stomach rolled and my muscles strained as I shifted my son in my arms and then hoisted his limp upper body as high as I could. Tanner was able to catch him under the arms and pull him out of the water.

  In any other situation, that would have meant safety.

  But getting him out of the water was only the first hurdle we’d have to face.

  As soon as he was out of my arms, Charlotte’s caught my elbow. “Help me up!”

  Her eyes were wild, but she didn’t delay in using my body to climb on to the dock after him.

  “Call nine-one-one!” Tanner screamed at everyone and no one as he moved out of Charlotte’s way.

  “Please. Please. Please. Let him be okay,” I chanted to myself as I scrambled up, slicing my foot on a splintered edge of the wood. But the pain didn’t even register among the agony in my chest.

  Tanner moved to the side, and together, we helped our father up.

  “Travis. Baby. Please!” Charlotte cried, tears dripping from her chin as she started chest compressions.

  “What can I do?” I asked her, dropping beside them to my knees and brushing his dark-brown hair off his forehead.

  “Move!” she barked before starting rescue breathing.

  I lifted my hands in surrender and fell back onto my ass as my nightmare played out in front of me.

  There was a bustle of activity around us. But my eyes never left Travis.

  I aged at least fifty years as I watched her fevered efforts to revive our son, but nothing seemed to be working. And, as the seconds turned into minutes, I became more and more panicked that they never would.

  I couldn’t be sure how long it had been since he’d collapsed, but a surge of adrenaline and relief slammed into me when the paramedics finally appeared.

  Charlotte rose off his body—and it killed me to admit it, but that was all it was at that point. She started rambling off orders and stats. Even as tears streamed from her eyes, she was able to list his medications and all of his health information.

  Meanwhile, I could barely think.

  My body was numb, and the air around us felt too thick to breathe.

  I’d just gotten him back. We were supposed to be a family. Together. Forever.

  This wasn’t allowed to happen. There had been only one option with his heart condition, and dying was not it.

  We were happy.

  We were supposed to stay happy.

  With hollow eyes and an equally hollow chest, I watched them load him onto a gurney, and then he was gone. Charlotte jogged beside him.

  But I was stuck. Physically unable to move.

  I blinked at the ground. The chair he had sat in only minutes earlier had been shoved out of the way, his fishing pole lost in the pond and his tackle box spilled out, various lures and hooks scattered around. But it was the wet silhouette of his body that tore my heart from my chest.

  What if that was all that was left of him?

  The sun still hung bright in the sky, but midnight fell all the same. And, in that moment, I feared I’d never escape it again.

  The darkness was going to be my executioner.

  It was going to crush me, suffocate me, and then devour me.

  “Porter,” someone called.

  I snapped out of it long enough to see that it was Charlotte.

  Hooking her arm in the air, she yelled, “Let’s go! He needs you!”

  Needs was present tense.

  Hope roared to life inside me.

  And only then did my feet become unstuck.

  * * *

  He was alive.

  In bad shape.

  But alive.

  Which, as I was giving him CPR on my hands and knees, was more than I had thought possible.

  After several failed attempts on the ambulance ride over, the ER docto
rs had been able to shock his weak heart back into a rhythm. Not since I had been pregnant, having my first ultrasound, had the sound of a heartbeat been so beautiful. But the minute the beeps of my son’s heart rising and falling rang through the air as I stood helplessly outside the room, I collapsed to my knees.

  I burst into tears and sank to the floor, Porter right beside me, his chest heaving in time with mine, a million curse words mixed with blessed praises rolling from our tongues.

  We didn’t touch. Or speak.

  We didn’t need words. Or comfort.

  We needed a miracle.

  The world moved in a flurry as I frantically tried to keep up, all the while watching my hopes and dreams fade out of reach.

  We sat there for God only knows how long as doctors and nurses continued trying to stabilize him enough to move him to a room.

  The hospital was a small community. And, once word had gotten around that my son had been admitted, the staff flooded the ER. Greg, my partner at North Point Pulmonology, was one of the first to arrive. He’d been acting as Travis’s pulmonologist for the last few weeks, but his orders were coming from friends of mine at Texas Children’s Hospital.

  “Did you call them?” I asked, jumping to my feet.

  Porter rose to his feet beside me and attempted to take my hand, but I shook it off.

  “Did you?” I asked again.

  Greg’s concerned gaze dipped to my soaking-wet shirt and then back to my eyes. “I did. Erin said she can’t get away, but Gina is catching a flight out.” He lifted a finger at a passing nurse. “Can you grab them some scrubs to put on?”

  “Listen. No. Call her back. We don’t need a pulmonologist. I need a team of cardiologists. The best they have.”

  Porter moved into my side and added, “Dr. Kreh is the head of cardiology at TCH. I talked to him a few weeks ago on the phone. He’s familiar with Travis’s case.”

  Greg looked at him for only a beat and then ignored him altogether. His face became soft, and his words were gentle. “Charlotte, you know there is nothing he can do at this point.”