Chapter 13

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He was all alone in his room, and they let me sit with him. Apparently, his parents were travelling overseas, and he had no other close relatives around. The doctors were waiting for him to wake up, to assess if there was any brain damage. They were hopeful there wasn’t anything seriously wrong apart from a few broken bones, but they’d feel more confident if he’d just come back to consciousness. The longer that lasted, the more likely it was he’d stay in a coma. They repeated that a couple of times, looking at me with a kind of professional reassurance laced with hope.

I just sat on the cold plastic chair beside his bed and stared at the man the notes said was Marcus Armstrong.

But he was hardly Marcus at all—not the one from the office, not the one from my bed. Just a poor, bruised body swaddled in bandages and splints, being fed life from a tube.