Page 160 of Cruel Abandon (Fallen Royals 5)
My former roommate is alive. She helped me survive, too. I suspect she’ll be in therapy for a while. Trauma messes with your brain.
She’s been closely monitored by doctors across the hall. I was right about one thing: she did catch pneumonia.
“Here we are,” a nurse says, bringing in a stack of forms for me to sign.
Dad takes a cursory glance through all of them before nodding to me.
I sign, and then we’re free to leave. The nurse helps me into a wheelchair, and I cast a long glance into Whitney’s room before we completely pass it. She seems to be sleeping, her mother asleep on the cot beside her.
Mom’s phone beeps. She and Dad follow the nurse and me, but now she hurries to catch up. “Detective McAdams texted. She says the Rose Hill police just arrested Alan Morrison.”
I shut my eyes.
I know what it means: there will be a trial. I’ll undoubtedly have to testify.
“Mom…”
“She says they found the secret room in a storage shed,” she breathes. “And some of the cash…”
“Do we get that back?” Dad quips.
Mom rolls her eyes and then frowns at me. “Honey, focus. This might be enough evidence to keep you off the stand. Although…”
What would me testifying do to Liam? Or his mother? Or Jake?
Oh, god.
A lump forms in my throat. He’s going to abandon me. I can feel it. Who would stay after that? After I remembered?
“Are we going home?” I ask them. I don’t necessarily want to leave the semester incomplete, but the school has given me medical leave. I’ll return in January… if at all.
“Yes,” Mom says. “We’ll just go collect your things from the apartment and be on our way.”
The nurse hits the button in the elevator for the ground floor, and my stomach jumps into my throat on the way down. I grip the armrests of the wheelchair.
The doors slide open, and Liam is there. He seems a little more bruised than I’d usually like him—a reddish-purple mark on his cheekbone, a scrape near his jaw. He’s got a thick bandage on his arm, peeking out from his rolled-up sleeves. I’ve never seen him in a collared shirt before, and it’s devastatingly handsome on him. My abdomen clenches.
I’m going home, and I don’t know when the next time I’ll see him will be. A week? A month? He might want to forget about me after this, and I wouldn’t blame him.
I’d blame me.
When he sees me, he frowns.
“You came back,” I blurt out.
He tilts his head. “Of course I did. Did you think…”
“I thought you wouldn’t want to.”
The nurse pushes my chair out of the elevator, leaving it just in front of Liam. My parents stay back, hovering by the door. They’re just off to the side, watching us like hawks—and pretending they’re not.
Liam’s eyes drop, then meet mine again. “Why would you think that?”
Liam kneels in front of me, taking my hands.
I lean forward in the chair. “I would think that because your dad is the one who kidnapped me. They arrested him.”
“You know what?” He narrows his eyes. “Dad can burn in hell for what he did. I’ve been on your side since I found you in the woods. Since I first saw what he did to you. And then every time you had a nightmare and I was the one you needed?”