Chapter 17

“What did she say, Dane?” he asked softly.

I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t give me that. I saw your face just now. It was like a shadow passed over. What did she say, exactly?”

My mother had always been frail. And sickly. During my childhood she’d even ended up in the hospital few times with pneumonia. She’d had asthma all her life, and any cold she got always went straight to her lungs.

That last time she had been sick enough I had to have her hospitalized. I’d barely turned twenty and hadn’t known what else to do for her.

I spent lots of hours sitting by her bedside as she got frailer and frailer.

“Dane, call the nurse for me,” she rasped from her hospital bed. “I need another pillow behind my head.”

“Maybe I could do that for you?”

She made a sort of coughing noise that I thought was meant to be a laugh. “You’re too weak. Push the nurse’s button. It’s their job.”