Chapter 5

The weather was beautiful on the day Graham was discharged.

He took care of the discharge paperwork himself and slowly drove back toward the Winthrop mansion.

His car had just turned onto the tree-lined road at the entrance to the gated community when someone suddenly burst out of the landscaping along the roadside and charged straight at the front of his car.

There was a loud, sickening thud.

Graham slammed on the brakes and wrenched the wheel, but the front of the car still clipped the figure.

The person crumpled to the ground.

It was Colin.

Graham's heart stopped for a second. He immediately unbuckled his seatbelt and got out to check.

Colin lay on the ground with a scrape on his temple that was oozing blood. His face was pale and his eyes were closed, but his chest was still rising and falling.

Graham called for an ambulance right away, then called the police. The ambulance and the police car arrived almost at the same time.

As the driver involved, Graham had to cooperate with the investigation.

He rode to the hospital with the ambulance and waited outside the operating room.

Before long, Holly and his parents came rushing in.

Their faces were full of panic and worry, and none of them so much as glanced at Graham standing off to the side. They went straight to the operating room doors and grabbed a nurse who happened to be coming out. "How's my son? Is he okay?"

The nurse was startled by the state they were in. "He's still in surgery. You'll have to wait for the doctor to come out for the details."

Holly paced restlessly outside the doors, while Lionel and Joyce held on to each other, their eyes red.

From start to finish, not one of them asked Graham whether he was hurt or whether he had been shaken up.

Graham stood quietly in the shadows of the hallway and watched them worry themselves sick over Colin. The frozen wasteland inside him no longer showed even the faintest crack.

At last, the light over the operating room went out.

The doctor came out, and Holly and his parents swarmed over at once.

"Doctor, how's my son?"

The doctor pulled off the surgical mask and let out a relieved breath. "The surgery went well. He's out of danger, and he'll wake up once the anesthesia wears off. We stitched up the cut on his temple too. Just watch it for infection and make sure he gets plenty of rest."

The three of them had barely exhaled when the doctor went on. "However, when we gave him a full examination, we found a lot of bruising and soft tissue damage all over his body, some old and some new. It doesn't look like it came from the accident.

"It looks more like he was beaten. You may want to find out what happened once he's awake."

Holly and his parents went pale.

Seeing that Colin was out of danger, Graham turned to leave.

"Graham!" Only then did Holly notice him. She grabbed his wrist hard, and her voice was icy.

"You did this to Colin, and now you're just going to walk away without a word of explanation?"

Graham stopped. He was about to say something when Colin's weak voice drifted out of the room. "Holly... Dad... Mom..."

The three of them left him standing there and rushed inside.

Graham stood at the door. Through the glass, he saw Colin with gauze wrapped around his head and his face pale, surrounded by his parents and Holly as they murmured gentle words of comfort.

From inside the room came his parents' careful questions. "Colin, what happened to you? All these injuries..."

Colin cast a timid glance at Graham in the doorway and hesitated.

"It's... It's nothing," he said quietly. "I was just careless."

"Colin, tell us the truth!" Holly came back to the bed, her tone pressing. "Where did those bruises come from?"

Under her questioning, Colin finally broke, and the words came out in halting pieces. "It was Graham. When you took me to the Velaro Islands, he saw what I posted and got really angry. He texted me all day long, cursing me out. The things he said were awful.

"After we got back, I wanted to talk to him and clear things up. I never thought he'd get a bunch of guys to corner me in an alley and beat me up."

He sounded heartbroken. "I knew Graham was getting out of the hospital today, so I wanted to come home and talk to him. I wanted to tell him I never meant to take anything from him.

"I'd just gotten to the gate when I heard a car and knew it was him, so I went out to meet him. I never thought he'd see me and drive straight at me..."

By the end, he could not hold back and broke down sobbing.