“To the hospital!” I shouted.

“Are you okay?” said Wynezra. “You look… distracted.”

We had just entered Memorial Hospital of Carbondale from the parking garage elevator. The walls were utopia white, the tile floor was speckled in colorful geometric shapes, and—in regard to Wynezra’s observation—I was eyeing everyone in scrubs or a lab coat like they were raging nymphos.

It was stupid. I knew it was stupid. What did I think Memorial Hospital of Carbondale was? A porno? Where every flat surface was fair game, reflex hammers and stethoscopes were bondage toys, and the climax happened inside a giant X-ray machine? My parents obviously weren’t doing it here. But they did have sixty-plus-hour workweeks, and they were meeting their lovers somewhere. The way I figured, it was either here or Tinder. They didn’t have time to meet anyone anywhere else.

Just the thought of it seized up my insides.

But then I thought of Willow.

Blood raged through my veins.

Nothing else mattered.

Finding my parents was easier than I thought it would be. All I had to do was go to the well-lit front desk of the well-lit lobby of Memorial Hospital of Carbondale—where lighting was more important than sex-in-the-workplace regulations—and say, very politely and very urgently, “Excuse me, we’re having a family emergency, and we need to speak to our parents, Mark and Janet Slevin, they’re doctors here, and they’re our parents and this is a very urgent family emergency.”

I was only half-lying about the “our parents” bit. It was half-true for both of us. The important part was repeating and emphasizing “family emergency.” It was a well-known buzzword that few people questioned and possessed an almost magical ability to Make Shit Happen.

The woman at the front desk—a tired old lady with hair like cobweb-flavored cotton candy—gave us an alarmed look and quickly picked up the phone and started muttering urgently and Making Shit Happen. She nodded a couple times and then lowered the phone to her chest.

“Doctor… er… Mark Slevin is currently in surgery,” she said. “But Janet is on her way over.”

Wynezra and I stepped awkwardly to the side of the front desk, allowing the man behind us to complain about his pain medication, and no he didn’t have an appointment, why should he need a damn appointment if that crock of a doctor of his prescribed him damn placebos, damn sugar pills, he’d sure like to see that doctor’s doctor license, where’d he get it, Chuck E. Cheese’s?

And then Mom appeared.