Hunter's Alpha (gxg) ✓

35. Top Ten

The moment the doctor enters the room, I stand up.

I am thirteen. I came here alone.

When he sees me, the faintest twitch of his face reveals what I have been dreading. Growing up in the Mafia, you learn things━like how to read faces. Play mind games. And I'm better than most, although I wish, in this moment, that I wasn't.

"I think you might need to sit down, Miss . . ."

"Easton," I say, swallowing. But I don't sit.

When I got the phone call, telling me I was Mary Chopin's emergency contact, I didn't hesitate. And when I arrived, when California General hospital was surprised to see a thirteen-year-old girl claim to be the woman's emergency phone number, I stayed. Even though they threatened to escort me off the premises and take me back home to my parents.

And they did do that. But I came back, and kept coming back.

Nothing could stop me from being here.

"She has amnesia," Doctor Theodore says. "I'm afraid your . . . friend . . . has suffered a concussion that will leave her with no long-term memories."

"But . . . not forever right? Not permanently?"

The doctor shakes his head. "Most of her childhood memories she will never recover. But in time . . . we'll see. The most she will likely ever know of her past are key points. Like the first time she did karate, or the first time she witnessed something traumatic. But nothing more."

"She'll forget even me?"

Doctor Theodore nods. "She has already forgotten."

Electricity zips through me. "She's awake?"

"Yes, and you may see her, but first . . . her mother has requested to talk to you."

When I see Mary Chopin, she is a ghost of her former self. A pale, trembling woman, who seems to have aged almost ten years since the last time I saw her━a month ago.

Now that Jude moved away from Lafayette and we are no longer neighbours, we barely see each other, but we do.

Sometimes I take a bus to California. Sometimes I steal money out of my mom's purse and hail a cab. But whatever it takes, I refuse to go without seeing Jude for too long.

Still, it was a surprise that I am her mother's emergency contact.

But ever since her husband and her son died . . . I guess I understand.

"Hunter," she says, hushed, choked.

"Mrs. Chopin?"

"You're here."

"I━I came for Jude. They said you were in an accident . . ."

"Yes," she whispers. "I tried to . . . I tried to . . ."

The doctor is gone, and it is us, alone in the hospital room.

She seems so frail. A shell of her former self.

"I tried to drive us off a bridge."

Heat explodes through me. Jude━is she okay? Does she know? "What?" I bark.