Good Lord, they said you were in prison.” I told her I’d gotten out.
Asked where Emily was. Mrs. Parker glanced over her shoulder like someone might be listening and whispered, “They took Emily to the hospital two weeks ago.” An ambulance came.
“She was lying in the stairwell, covered in blood.” I asked what happened. Mrs. Parker started crying and said, “Ethan, they did something awful to that girl.”
“Don’t ask me, I can’t say it. Go to the hospital. They’ll tell you there.” I didn’t wait to hear more. I turned and ran down the stairs.
Hit the street and flagged down the first car I saw. A guy about twenty-five stared at me like I’d climbed out of a grave. “County hospital. Fast.”
He nodded and hit the gas. The whole way there I said nothing and stared at my hands. These hands had killed.
These hands had saved lives. These hands had clenched into fists on a prison bunk for seven years while I imagined hugging my sister again. But those hands hadn’t been there when she was screaming in that stairwell, and that was worse than any sentence.
County General. Gray building, peeling paint, rusted awnings, and the smell of disinfectant before you even got through the doors. I walked into the ER and gave my sister’s last name.
The woman at the desk looked at the computer, then at me, and I saw that look in her eyes—the one I learned to read in combat. The look people get when the news is bad and saying it out loud hurts. She asked who I was.
Her brother. Immediate family. She picked up the phone and called for a doctor.
The doctor came out five minutes later. Woman in her mid-forties, thin, dark circles under her eyes, hands that smelled like sanitizer. She looked at my haircut, my prison boots, my face, and understood enough without explanation.
“Come with me,” she said quietly. “You should sit down.” I didn’t sit.
I stood in front of her desk and listened while she listed the injuries. Fractured lower jaw in two places. Four broken ribs.
Closed head injury. Multiple hematomas. Tears.
She said the word and stopped, watching me. Soft tissue tearing consistent with sexual assault. Biological evidence from three separate male sources.
Three men. I listened and felt something happening inside me. Not an explosion.
No. An explosion is fast, hot, chaotic. This was different.
Slow. Cold. Final. Like somebody inside my chest turned a key. And a mechanism that had been paused for seven years started moving again.
Click. Click. Click. The gears began to turn. I felt everything unnecessary fall away.
Fear. Confusion. Self-pity. What remained was one thing only: purpose. I asked to see her.
The doctor shook her head and said Emily was in trauma recovery. Stable, but in serious condition. And badly traumatized.
She wouldn’t let men near her. She screamed, panicked, shut down. I said, “I’m her brother. She’s not afraid of me.” The doctor held my gaze for a long moment and said, “All right. But if she starts screaming, you leave immediately.”
Third floor. Four beds in the room, three empty, one by the window behind a curtain. I walked slowly.
Every step felt like my legs were full of lead. I looked behind the curtain and saw my sister. She was lying on her side, curled up tight, blanket pulled to her chin.
Her face. God, her face. The left side was one solid bruise from temple to jaw, yellow and purple with green at the edges like rotten fruit.
Her lip was split and taped. One eye was swollen completely shut. On her neck I saw finger marks…
