Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Evelyn's POV

Mom wrapped me in the old quilt from the back of the couch. The one with the faded sunflowers that she'd stitched the winter Dad died.

"Drink," she said, pressing a mug of moonflower tea into my hands. "Small sips."

My hands were shaking so badly the tea rippled. She closed her fingers over mine to steady them, and that small act of kindness broke me all over again.

"I lost the baby, Mama." I hadn't said it out loud yet. Saying it made it real. "I lost my pup."

Her face crumpled. She didn't say it will be okay. She didn't say everything happens for a reason. She just pulled my head against her chest and held me while I shook, her old heart beating slow and steady under my ear.

"He rejected me," I whispered into her robe. "He said the words, Mama. In front of her. He rejected me and my body just... let go."

Mom's arms tightened. I felt something wet land in my hair. She was crying too, silently, the way she'd cried at Dad's burial. Grief without sound. Omega grief.

"That man," she said, and her voice trembled with a rage I'd never heard from her. "That man was never worthy of you. Your father saw it. I should have listened."

"Don't." I couldn't hear it. Not tonight. "Please don't."

"Okay, baby. Okay."

She rocked me like I was seven years old again. Outside, the moon climbed higher. Somewhere across town, my sister was sleeping in my bed, carrying my husband's child, planning a blood moon wedding.

And I was here. Bleeding. Empty. My wolf so silent that I kept reaching for her the way you press your tongue against a pulled tooth.

Nothing. Just a hole where she used to be.

Mom made me shower. She laid out one of her nightgowns, soft from a hundred washes, and put my ruined jeans in a bag I never wanted to see again. She tucked me into my childhood bed and sat with me, stroking my hair, humming the old pack lullaby about the moon who loved a wolf.

I didn't sleep. I just lay there, watching shadows move across the ceiling, feeling my body cramp and empty itself of everything I'd hoped for.

At some point near dawn, I heard her in the kitchen. The clink of her pill organizer. The tap running. Her heart medication, the expensive one, the one she cut in half sometimes when she thought I wasn't looking.

I made a promise to the ceiling right then. Whatever was left of me, whatever pieces I could gather up off the floor of my old life, they belonged to her now. I would take care of my mother if it was the last thing I did.

The universe heard me.

The universe has a cruel sense of humor.

The phone rang at 9:04 the next morning.

I know the exact time because I was staring at the kitchen clock, forcing down the toast Mom insisted I eat, when her ancient landline shrieked from the wall.

Mom answered it the way she answered everything, warm and open, no armor at all.

"Carter residence."

I watched her face change.

First confusion. Then recognition. Then something worse.

"Isabelle." Her voice was careful. "Slow down, sweetheart, I can't..."

Even from across the kitchen, I could hear my sister's voice spilling out of the receiver. Bright. Bubbly. Rehearsed.

I stood up so fast my chair scraped the floor. "Mama, hang up."

Mom held up a hand. Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, listening, and I watched the color drain out of her face like water out of a sink.

"Married?" she said faintly. "Married to... no. No, Isabelle, that's not... he's your sister's husband. He is your sister's mate."

The voice on the other end got louder. Delighted. I caught pieces of it. Pregnant, Mama. Blood moon festival. Second chance mate. We wanted you to hear it from me first.

Hear it from her first. As if it were good news. As if she were announcing a promotion.

"Give me the phone." I crossed the kitchen. "Mama, give me the phone."

Mom didn't seem to hear me. She had one hand pressed flat against her chest, and her breathing had gone shallow and quick.

"You were in her wedding," Mom whispered into the phone. "Isabelle. Baby. What did you do? What did you do?"

I don't know what my sister said next.

I only know that my mother made a small sound, like a hinge giving way, and the phone slipped out of her hand.

It hit the floor before she did.

"Mama!"

I caught her on the way down, but she was dead weight, and we both went to the linoleum together. Her eyes were open but wrong, one pupil blown wide, the other a pinpoint. The right side of her face had gone slack, melting downward like a candle left too close to a flame.

"Mama, look at me. Look at me!"

Her mouth moved. The sound that came out wasn't words. It was a wet, broken slur, and her right hand lay on the floor like it belonged to someone else.

Stroke.

The nurse in me catalogued it in two seconds flat. Facial droop. Unilateral weakness. Aphasia. Massive, and getting worse while I watched.

The daughter in me was screaming.

From the phone on the floor, tiny and tinny, my sister's voice kept going. "Mama? Hello? Ugh, did she hang up on me?"

I grabbed the phone. "You need to call 911. Mom's having a stroke. Isabelle, call them now, my cell is dead and I have to start..."

A pause. Then my sister's voice, cool and light as frost.

"God, Evelyn. You'll say anything to ruin my moment, won't you?"

The line went dead.

She hung up. My mother was dying on the kitchen floor and my sister hung up.

Something inside me went very cold and very clear.

I dragged the phone off the wall, dialed 911, and put it on speaker on the floor beside me. And then I did the thing I'd been trained to do, the thing I'd done for strangers a hundred times without my hands ever shaking like this.

I tilted my mother's head. Checked her airway. Counted her breaths. Talked to the dispatcher in a voice that sounded like someone else, someone calm, while my own body cramped and tore at itself, still bleeding out the last of my pup onto my mother's kitchen floor.

"Stay with me, Mama." I pressed my forehead to hers, my tears falling onto her slack cheek. "You stay with me. You're all I have left. Do you hear me? You are all I have left."

Her left hand, the good one, twitched against the floor.

She was trying to hold my hand.

The ambulance took eleven minutes. I know because the dispatcher kept telling me how close they were, and every minute was a year.

They wouldn't let me ride in the back. Protocol, the paramedic said, not unkindly, taking in my gray face and the way I was hunched around my own stomach. You should get looked at yourself, ma'am.

I followed the ambulance in my car, running two red lights, and walked into Memorial Hospital through the same emergency doors I'd walked through for six years wearing scrubs and a badge.

Tonight I walked in as family.

It's different on this side of the doors. The waiting room chairs are harder. The clock is slower. The vending machine coffee tastes like dread.

Hours passed. Nobody would tell me anything except that they were working on her. I sat in a plastic chair in my mother's borrowed cardigan, bleeding and hollow, watching the ICU doors swing open and shut for other people's emergencies.

Finally, a nurse I half recognized took pity on me and let me in for five minutes.

My mother, who had held me on the couch twelve hours ago, lay small and gray in a nest of tubes and wires, a machine breathing for her, her chest rising and falling to a rhythm that wasn't hers.

I took her left hand. The good one. The one that had reached for me on the kitchen floor.

The machines beeped. The ventilator hissed.

My mother didn't wake up.

"I'm going to fix this," I whispered. "I don't know how. But I swear on Dad's grave, I am going to fix this."