I walked through all the hallways that weren’t behind locked doors and I read the names on the door tags. Some of the doors were partially open and I could see the withering and decaying people inside. I hate hospitals. I made up stories about the patients in my head; which ones would live, and which ones wouldn’t, and who would grieve for them when they died. A nurse asked me if I was lost and I told her yes, but then I just kept walking the halls anyways. Maybe I would end up in a mental institution just like my aunt.

She did this.

I didn’t know how yet, but I know that she did. This was what she was going to do, kill them and take them all away. This was what she meant when she said I couldn’t have nice things. I tried to think back and remember why I liked playing with her as a child. I certainly didn’t like playing with her now as an adult. Aunt Naomi always had a very vivid imagination and when we would play, she always made the characters seem to come alive.

Now I remembered what it was that I liked about our plays so much, it took me a second but then it hit me as clearly as if it had happened just yesterday.

She always made the girls win.

We would play princesses and princes and she would always make the princess go fight the dragon while the prince cowered behind a big rock. Then the princess would end up taming the dragon instead of killing it and she’d make the dragon eat the prince. I always laughed at that part when I was little, but I wasn’t laughing at it any longer. When we would play with dolls, she always made the boy dolls act all stupid and funny when they came to pick the girls up for a date and then the date would usually end with the boy getting run over by the car. Even when we would just color pictures in my coloring books, she would draw horns and tails on the boys in the pictures and my mom would usually yell at her for it, but Naomi would just laugh as if it were our little secret.

I liked Aunt Naomi when I was a kid because she made me feel powerful and she made scary things feel funny.

Amazing how quickly those details can become sordid in adulthood.

When I heard someone call my name I didn’t turn around because it didn’t quite register that they were talking to me. But then when Rob’s hand grabbed my shoulder, I turned around and heard what he said.

“He’s alive.”

I ran down the hospital hallway so fast that I slid and fell on my tailbone with a loud cracking sound. I didn’t even care that it hurt when I got up and started to run again. As soon as we reached the waiting room, Adam grabbed me and pulled me tightly against his chest. I wrestled away from him because I wanted to see Michael.

“He’s alive,” Adam smiled at me. “The doctor just came out and said he’ll be okay after a while.”

“I want to see him,” I said.

“We have to wait until he gets into a recovery room,” Adam said.

“No! I want to see him now!”

“Lisette,” Rob said as he grabbed me by my head. He put both hands on the sides of my face and put his eyes right up against mine. “Listen to me. I know you’re upset, and I know you don’t think you can take anymore. But you have to calm down. There’s a lot of people watching the hospital right now and watching us. Cops, university board members, even your aunt is here.”

What?

Rob kept talking and it pulled me out of my head. “If you want to see Michael and not get removed from the hospital, you need to calm down now. Do you understand?”

I nodded my head, but I didn’t have the forethought to speak.

“Okay,” Rob said as he let go of my head and kissed me just to make it look like I was getting an embrace and not a “talking-to”.

I sat down in a chair between Adam and Rob and stared at my feet while we waited for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, the doctor came out and told us that we could go in to see Michael. I tried so hard not to run to the door that I had to hold both of the guys’ hands on either side of me to keep me from launching to my feet. As soon as the nurses left and we were alone in the room, I fell onto the side of his bed and laid my head against Michael’s arm.

I cried and whispered to him that I loved him and that I was so sorry that this had happened.

Then I lifted my head and looked at him. He had wires and tubes poking out from everywhere. His eyelids were taped closed and something looked like it was stuck down his throat. The gown over his chest was closed but I could see the stains of blood coming through it. I held his hand carefully because there were even tubes and things sticking out of veins in his wrist.

“The doctor said he should wake up in a day or so and that after a couple of weeks in the hospital he should be well enough to go home. They said he was lucky, and that aside from some scars on his chest he shouldn’t have any lasting effects from this,” Adam said.

I knew that was all supposed to be good news and that I should be happy about the fact that Michael would be “lucky” enough to survive, but I wasn’t. I was full of guilt and despair that this had happened to him and I wasn’t going to let it happen again. No one I cared about was going to be hurt again.

The next few days were agonizing. I sat beside Michael’s bed and watched as he woke up and began the painful process of healing. I always thought that the mental and emotional healing was the worst pain someone could go through and that the repairing of having to put your mind and feelings back together after they had been ripped apart, was about as painful as it could get.

But after seeing Michael’s body suffer through the pain of rebuilding itself internally around the places where five gunshots entered his body, I was beginning to rethink my leveling system for pain.

When he was finally well enough to return home, the four of us went back to Lineage only long enough to pack our things and get back in the car to go to the cottage in Asheville. Naomi was still at Goldshire and she would still be coming after us I was sure. That was why it would be so hard to do what I had to do. But for now, I would pretend none of that was coming and I would simply enjoy the time with the men I cared about and relish in the moments that I had with them.

The drive to Asheville was even longer now that I knew time was short. I gave it a couple of months, maybe three at the most. I sat in the backseat with Michael and I couldn’t bring myself to let go of his hand for even a second on that ride.

He thought that I was just happy he was home. Which I was, but there was more to it than that.

“Oh god, I have missed this place!” Michael beamed as soon as we walked in the door to the cottage.

He was so happy that he tried to pick me up and swing me around, but he ended up stopping short when the pain in his torso doubled him over.

“You have to be careful,” I reminded him gently. “You can’t push yourself like that until your body is ready.”

He coughed and flinched a little and then grinned at me. “But my body is ready.”

“You know what I mean,” I laughed.

It’s hard to be happy and to lie to them. It’s hard to act like my heat wasn’t being ripped out of my chest every moment that I forced myself to smile.

“Well, I didn’t hear the doctor say anything about not indulging in a glass of barrel-aged bourbon,” Adam joked as he pulled the bottle down and set the glasses out.

I rolled my eyes. “What is it, like, noon?”

“You don’t have to have any,” Rob teased.

“Oh please,” I said as I snatched up one of the glasses that Adam had poured.

We sat around that whole day and talked about the things we would do and watched the snow fall outside and listened to the crackling in the hearth. I wondered why it seemed like the seasons passed by so quickly when certain moments seemed to take forever to get through.

We had left Lineage under the care of a temporary proxy until the advisory council voted in a new headmistress. I didn’t want the job anymore. All four of us were very happy to walk away from it and to come here. It wasn’t exactly how we had planned for it to work out, and we hadn’t lived out the year that we were going to give it at Lineage, but that was fine.

“Hey,” Adam said as we were all snuggled up on the couch. “What happened to that promise you made?”

“Which one?” I asked. I knew which one he meant.

“The one about which of us you would choose. Seems like we all ended back up here together, but you were only supposed to pick one of us.”

“You want me to send a couple of you packing?” I teased.

Everyone laughed including me, even though it hurt to do so.

“Maybe you can all stay here together,” I said seriously now. “You’re all good friends now, right?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “We are. But I still don’t think that we can all share you forever.”

“Forever is a long time to think about, isn’t it?” I asked as I snuggled my head against his shoulder. “Let’s just think about right now for now.”