Like a robot, I went through the motions of telling her everything that had happened and did what she said, following the light of her flashlight with my eyes when she asked me to, answering her questions about whether I was hurting somewhere or not, letting her wrap a blanket around my shoulders when she noticed I was shaking.

Halfway through her examination, the paramedics put Jasper onto a stretcher and carried him inside the ambulance.

He was gone before I could even ask if I could come along.

° ° °

I had been to the hospital only once before, when I had broken my arm in PE in primary school. Even then, I had hated the smell of antiseptics and the glare of the ceiling lights against the mint green linoleum floor, and was glad when I could finally go home with my cast on and a cool story to tell.

Today, the feeling was no different. I had been sitting in the uncomfortable plastic chair next to the bed for going on two hours now, watching the seconds tick by on the clock. Next to me was Mrs. Whitworth; while Evelyn and Noelle had been taken to the police department to give a statement, she had taken me to the hospital. Wearing no makeup and sitting hunched over in her chair, she looked no better than I felt.

When I had asked her who had called the police and where she had come from, she explained to me that Amelia had been the one to notify her after she’d called Evelyn. She had heard the directions my phone gave in the background while I was driving, thus being able to tell the police where we were. I supposed that, though a lot of this was her fault, we also had to thank her, but that paradox was too complicated to think about now, so I pushed the thought away.

Instead, I looked up and asked the nurse, “When is he going to wake up?”

“As I said,” she said, an impatient edge to her voice as she repeated the same answer she had given me every other time I had asked over the previous two hours, “I don’t know that. You’ll just have to wait and be patient.”

I directed my eyes at the bed in front of me again. Jasper was wearing a hospital gown that had slipped down a little, revealing parts of the bandage that was covering the cut on his chest. In the harsh light of the ceiling lamp, he looked even paler than usual, his skin thin enough to show his veins and almost as white as the pillowcase on which his head was resting. Every once in a while, he would stir a little, but mostly his breathing was steady.

The doctor who had been here about an hour ago had told me it hadn’t been as bad as it looked. Jasper hadn’t passed out from blood loss—which, it turned out, hadn’t been as severe as it had seemed—but from the extreme anxiety his claustrophobia had caused mixed with lack of sleep over the last forty-eight hours. He had been awake for a few minutes during the ride to the hospital but had been unconscious again as his wound had gotten stitched.