A Day in My Life

Hope

Dylan POV:

The house was silent and dark. There was none of Dakota's irritating Taylor Swift music blasting, and there was no equally loud heavy metal music playing (desperately trying to drown out the sound of Taylor Swift) like there usually was.

We had gotten home from the hospital about two hours ago, and we each went off to be alone.

Realizing that I still hadn't eaten anything all day, I went downstairs to the kitchen. I passed our home office on the way down the hall. I noticed a sound coming from inside and I walked up to the door. Noticing that it was open a crack, I peered in and listened.

There Blake sat in a swivel chair, reading receipts and quietly rattling off numbers. He punched away at the buttons on his calculator and started to scribble something in his checkbook. The pencil broke and he chucked it onto the desk and reached for a stack of papers. His eyes helplessly scanned the lines of the pages. Finally, he took one of the sheets of papers and crumpled it up into a ball and thrust it onto the ground, missing the trashcan. He bit his lip and put his face in his hands, defeated.

It was only a few minutes until Blake joined me in the kitchen where I was leaning against the counter, pretending to not have seen what had just happened in the office.

"We can't afford it." he said out of nowhere, blank expression on his face. "Even if we wanted it to happen, and it's our best shot, we can't afford it."

"Afford what?" I asked, dreading the answer.

Blake looked at the floor, avoiding my gaze. "The surgery, Dylan, the surgery for Dakota." He spit his words at me but I knew it was because he felt like shit about the money. "We can't afford it." he repeated like a zombie.

My stomach dropped and I could suddenly feel my own heartbeat. "What do you mean we can't afford it?"

Blake just wordlessly shook his head.

"What about the money Mom and Dad left us?" I asked.

"There's not enough."

"How could that even be?" I asked. The money that had been willed to us seemed infinite in my mind, but then again, I had never actually known how much we had received or anything about our financial situation. I never thought to ask. It dawned on me now that Blake had been dealing with this by himself for years.

"There's just... not enough. I don't know what we're going to do..." Blake answered.

I wouldn't give up. This was Dakota's life we were talking about.

"I have money," I blurted out. "I was saving it for college, but this is more important."

"No," Blake shook his head. "You need that for your future. There has to be another way."

"We could ask someone to cover the difference. Like Uncle Rob, maybe," I suggested, mentioning Eric and Emma's dad.

"No, you can't just ask someone for that kind of money. It's going to cost about $46,000 and that's with insurance! And besides, Eric and Emma have been saying for ages about how their family has been having money issues."

$46,000? Holy shit. That was a lot of money.

"How much do we have?" I dared to ask.

"Six thousand."

"What did you say?"

"Six. Thousand," he repeated.

"Right," I said, trying to formulate a plan. "So we need to come up with the other forty."