Vincent's POV
The emergency unit was loud with a deafening kind of chaos. A collision between two commercial buses had brought in patients with injuries ranging from minor lacerations to fractures, and the unit was struggling to absorb all of it.
Nurses rushed past, relatives crowded the corridors, pressing against the walls, and all around me, injured people kept screaming.
I had been off-call when the phone rang. The caller told me my brother had been admitted and that I should come immediately. They said nothing else. Nothing about his condition, nothing about what happened. That silence did more damage than any diagnosis could have.
By the time I pushed through the unit doors, I had already imagined three different versions of Andrew's death.
I work as a surgical resident at the Federal Medical Center in Albana, which sits close to the university Andrew attends. Like my father before me, I had chosen to specialize in surgery. Unlike my father, I had chosen not to work for him.
My father had wanted me at Sawyer Memorial, his self-owned hospital, for years. But I knew what working under him would look like. He would have called it mentorship. I would have called it controlled suffering. More than that, I wanted to build something that was mine. Not borrowed from his name or shadowed by his reputation. I wanted my growth to be earned.
So I came here instead. And I was still learning what that decision meant, still finding out what I was worth when nobody was watching because of whose son I was.
Drew had always been the louder version of everything I kept quiet. Where I calculated, he reacted. Where I endured, he exploded. I had spent years quietly absorbing the difference between us so that our father's comparisons would not destroy him. But standing in this emergency unit, not knowing if he was alive or unconscious or bleeding out, made all of that felt very small.
I went straight to the reception desk.
"Nurse."
The nurse behind the counter was typing rapidly without looking up, professionally ignoring the fact that I was standing directly in front of her.
"Hi," I said, glancing at her name tag. "Sylvia."
She looked up with an initial scowl, which vanished instantly, replaced by a smile as she twirled a strand of hair.
"Doctor Sawyer. How may I help you?" she chirped.
I was not in the mood for it.
"My brother," I said. "Andrew Sawyer. He was admitted here."
She turned to her computer and typed quickly.
"Yes." She paused, reading something on her screen. "He was brought in for a stab wound. A lady and two security men accompanied him." She looked up. "Don't worry, Doctor. He's out of immediate danger and responding to treatment."
I heard the words, but they did very little to calm my pulsating veins. I needed to see him.
When I finally saw my little brother, I exhaled the dread plaguing my entire being.
He was alive. Even though the doctor mentioned he was not out of the woods yet, even with all the tubes connected to him, the sight of him breathing quieted my trembling hands.
A pencil.
Someone had stabbed my brother in the neck with a pencil.
The object had been thin enough and driven in with enough force to graze the wall of the carotid artery, stopping just short of a full puncture. A fraction of a centimeter in any other direction, and we would not be having this conversation.
He had also hit his head on the ground when he fell, resulting in a mild concussion.
I read the incident report twice.
According to the statement made by the girl who had brought him in, she and Andrew had been returning from reading together when a gang of thugs attacked them. She said Andrew had fought back to protect her. During the struggle, one of the attackers had grabbed a pencil, presumably hers, and stabbed him in the neck.
I set the report down.
The sobriety test conducted on admission showed significant alcohol in Andrew's system. He had been heavily drunk. Whatever he had been doing that night, it was not reading. Andrew reading was not something that existed in any version of my brother that I knew. And there was no way he could have been studying in that state, even if he had a gun pointed at him.
Her story had gaps large enough to walk through.
The nurses told me the girl had not left any contact details. She had simply handed him over and disappeared. Though they assured me she had said she would return.
I stared at Andrew's face and felt my blood boil.
Andrew's women had always been a recurring problem. I had lost count of the times I had seen girls attach themselves to him for reasons that had nothing to do with who he actually was. I had threatened to put him out when he kept bringing them around. He had stopped, but the girls had not.
This one had stabbed him, then constructed a story neat enough to make herself the victim.
I looked at him lying there, unconscious and wounded, and remembered that one time after one of our stupid arguments, he had looked me dead in the eye and said that out of everyone in his life, I was the only one he trusted with his life. The only one who would always have his back.
Standing there beside his hospital bed, all I could think was that he had been wrong.
Because when he needed me most, I had not been there.
I pressed my fist against the wall, gritting my teeth to control my anger. When she came back, I was going to be ready.
***
She arrived the following morning.
Sylvia at the front desk sent me a message the moment the girl walked in, just as I had asked. I had not slept. I had sat in the chair beside Andrew's bed for most of the night, watching him breathe, thinking about what kind of person could do this to someone and then sleep soundly enough to walk in looking that calm.
I followed her from a distance.
She was not what I had expected.
Andrew's usual ladies dressed in a way that announced them. They always had on fitted things, full faces of makeup, a deliberateness to every detail. This girl had on a simple white floral dress that ended above the knee. No jewelry that I could see. No dramatic movements. She even looked younger than Andrew's type of women.
As she made her way to Andrew's room, she kept glancing around the corridor as though she was not sure she was allowed to be here.
I reminded myself that people who were calculating knew how to look innocent. That was rather the point.
She stopped in the corridor first, looked both ways, then slowly pushed the door open and slipped inside.
I moved to the door. Through the small glass panel, I could see her pull a stool close to the bed and sit, just as Andrew was just beginning to stir.
I had my hand raised to push the door open when I stopped myself. I needed to know what she was going to do before I stepped in.
I waited.
Then I heard her voice, and the words that followed made my raised hand drop limply to my side.