When I Was Theirs

20. Emmy

20

Emmy

F rowning, I flick through my notepad as I wait for the ridiculously chirpy hold music to cut off.

Finally, the bored-sounding woman comes back on the line. “I’m sorry, we have no record of anyone by that name.”

Damn it. “Thanks for—,”

She’s already hung up.

Sighing, I run my pen through the last line of a long list.

Where are you, Jared?

Ben’s brother is a ghost. He has no social media presence. No listing in the directory. And Ben’s memory is fractured enough that he can only remember a place Jared once worked.

The trail is cold.

My head jerks up at the sound of coughing.

“Ben?” I’m out in the living room in a flash, leaning over him. But he only twists in his sleep, kicking off the covers on the bed. I carefully pull them up, averting my eyes from his swollen abdomen. His eyes flicker open, and I pause. “Hey, you.”

Sometimes he responds.

Today, clouded brown eyes shift to mine. “Hey.”

Gingerly, I settle on the bed beside him. His eyes move from me, head tilting to look at the plastic seat beside his bed. His eyes close.

“You need to go?” I keep my voice quiet. Soothing.

He nods stiffly. “I can… I can do it.”

My heart twists and squeezes as I stand back to give him space. Ben uses the railing on his bed to pull himself upright with painfully slow movements, breathing heavily. Turning around, I stick to our silent mutual agreement to give him as much privacy as I can while staying close. My fingers pick at the bedding as I wait.

And wait.

Finally, he coughs. “At least hum or something. I’m getting performance anxiety.”

At the familiar, faint thrum of amusement in his words, my heart flips again. Humming tunelessly, I wait for him to finish, to pull himself back into bed.

And then I’ll ask.

Maybe today he’ll remember.

“Em,” he whispers, cutting me off. “I can’t… get up.”

I whip around. Ben’s head is hanging down, his shoulders shaking. “I can’t—,”

“I’ve got you.” My throat is tight as I pull up his sweatpants, wrapping my arms around his waist and lifting him so I can tug them into place.

It’s like holding air in my arms. As if Ben is drifting away, piece by piece. And his sobs – they’re silent, as he leans against me and I help him back into the bed where he spends most of his time.

We’re running out of time.

He collapses back with a groan, as I reach for the hand sanitiser and rub it into his hands. When I’m finished, he turns my hands over, gripping them. “In the closet, there’s a box. Everything is in there. Documents, identification. Everything you’ll need.”

I focus on his hands, blinking away my own tears. “I never knew you were so organized.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Em.” He croaks the words, but he’s staring up at the ceiling when I look up. “We never even had a chance, did we? You never got to be my girlfriend, not really. Just my caregiver.”

“That’s not true—,”

“You deserve better.” He cuts off my words as if he can’t hear me at all. “You deserve so much better than this shit. We should be traveling, having fun. But you’re stuck here with me, and I’m so sorry. You should have left. Like Jared.”

Frowning, I squeeze his hand. “What do you mean?”

“He left,” Ben whispers. Tracks of tears are trailing down the side of his face, pooling in his hairline as I stop breathing. “He tried so hard, but he knew he couldn’t do it. That’s why he left.”

“He… he left you?” I try to keep my voice level, but anger surges inside me. “That asshole .”

I take back every sympathetic thought, as I stare at Ben, crying silently on the bed with glioblastoma wrecking his body and his mind. Every kind thought I ever had toward Jared Bennett – I wipe it away.

“I want my brother,” Ben sobs quietly. He curls up, with his hands wrapped around his head. “I need to make things right, Em.”

I’ve spent hours upon hours searching for Jared over the last week. For any sign of him. Trying to get Ben to remember his phone number, only to receive garbled strings of numbers that make no sense.

Time that I could have spent with Ben, instead of trying to track down the brother who apparently abandoned him.

So I don’t have any expectations when I ask him again. “What’s his number?”

But this time… this time, he doesn’t hesitate.

I scramble for my notepad, frantically writing down the number that he repeats twice, before he falls asleep again.

And I stare down at it.

It looks… like a phone number.

Jared Bennett.