“You sure you don’t need help?” his partner asks, but like his “help” is not going to be a thing I actually want.

“No, I’m fine,” I say again.

I spin around and head back the way I came.

BACK OUT IN the hallway, I look up and down the row of closed doors. I want to find Kelsey’s, but I have no idea which room is hers. And following up my tackle of the “NIH doctor” with waking everyone up in the middle of the night probably isn’t going to help my situation.

Instead, I head back to my room, crawl into bed, and turn on my side. Curled up into a C, I try not to think. But my mind spins anyway, and straight to Jasper. Is he really okay? Did Dr. Alvarez actually even speak with his mom? Deep down, I still do feel like he is okay. I believe it. But I’d feel a whole lot better if I had actual proof.

My mom is probably the only person who could really convince me that everything is going to be okay anyway. And she won’t be convincing me of anything ever again, of course.

So instead of feeling any better, I toss and turn. For so long that eventually I pray not for sleep, but just for dawn.

“I’M TELLING YOU that I have a bad feeling about him, that’s all,” I heard my mom say as I made my way up the stairs a few weeks before her accident. I braced myself thinking that I was overhearing my parents having yet another of their increasingly frequent fights.

But when I finally got to the top of the steps and peered in the door, they were the picture of domestic bliss. My dad was folding laundry, my mom cross-legged on the bed, surrounded by a ring of photographs. She was in between actual assignments, which meant she had to be working on one of her freelance projects, which always involved trying to expose one injustice or another that never seemed to fully materialize. Having spent so much time in war zones, she was especially obsessed with the military and proper oversight. So far, none of my mom’s extracurricular activities (“conspiracy theories,” my dad had teased) had gotten very far. But that had only made her more intent. Her thick black glasses were halfway down her nose as she selected shots, inspected them, and then discarded each, one by one.

I sat down on the landing, close to their bedroom door, curious now. It wasn’t anger I had heard in their voices, but it had been something.

“He’s in AA,” my dad said. “Don’t people always go a little overboard at first? It’s like part of the program.” My dad laughed a little. “The program. See the little pun I made there. And the kids say I’m not funny anymore.”