Chapter 19: THEY WANTS ME BACK IN THE FAMILY

Chapter 19: THEY WANTS ME BACK IN THE FAMILY
I slid into the back seat and closed the door, the car swallowing us into the city’s gray pulse. My hands trembled around the strap of my bag, part nerves, part fatigue.

I tapped Dylan’s name on my phone as we moved, texting in short bursts: I’m on my way. I need the meds I missed.

Jenna nearly recognized me at the hospital. I hit send before I could second-guess the words.

Dylan was a friend and a doctor, the one person who had treated me when the world narrowed to sterile lights and the hum of machines. I trusted her in ways I didn’t trust myself.

If anyone could patch the frayed edges of my health and keep me mobile for the trip, it was her.

When we arrived at the hospital, I slipped on my face cover like a costume and pushed through the automatic doors. The antiseptic smell hit me clean, clinical, oddly steadying and for a moment I felt anchored.

I found Dylan’s office and pushed the door open, but she wasn’t there. Panic flickered. I hurried down the corridor toward the ward where I had been kept the last time I’d walked these halls; there, between the pale curtains and beeping monitors, I saw her.

Dylan was moving toward me, and when our eyes met something inside me unclenched.

She came fast, and when she reached me she wrapped me up like I was the only person in the place worth protecting.

We hugged tight, wordless two people who had only ever truly known each other in hospitals and hanging on by a thread. Her arms smelled faintly of hand sanitizer and lemon, ordinary and miraculous.

We went straight into her office. She waved me to the chair opposite her desk and sat down as if the world outside could wait.

I spilled everything in fragments: the missed flight, the message from the Vice President of Mexico, Jack’s warning, Jenna almost catching me in the corridor with her husband.

I told her about the appointment that would have fed my family for months, maybe years, and how I’d watched it evaporate like mist.

Dylan listened with slow, steady nods. She didn’t interrupt with platitudes. She only took in the facts and considered them like a clinician, but there was softness in her eyes.

She already knew, she said, what the stakes were: my health, the travel risk, the politics of leaving the country when enemies still hunted me.

If I didn’t take care of myself, I couldn’t go anywhere, no matter how many visas or private jets were lined up.

When the conversation spilled out into practicalities she stood up. “Come with me. I’ll get you the meds from the other department,” she said calmly, rising and opening the office door as if the rest of the hospital weren’t a powder keg.

I followed her because I had no better plan. I couldn’t imagine losing this chance. To leave, really leave, and not look over my shoulder God, the thought of it almost made me laugh through the tears.

I thought of my family: the relief on my mother’s face if I could send money; Darius finally breathing easier. I thought of Jack if he’d wanted this for me, then I owed it to him to try.

But then the impossible happened: the flight wouldn’t hold. Some unseen, cruel twist of fate had intervened. I felt the air go out of me, and for a moment I was a child abandoned on the roadside, howling for something I couldn’t name.

I sat down in the waiting area outside Dylan’s office and let the grief come. It hit like a physical blow hot, sapping, humiliating.

I moved, though. I couldn’t just sit there. I got up and pressed my ear against the thin wall that separated the hallway from the office, trying to hear anything that might give me footing.

On the other side, Dylan worked quietly, her voice low with concentration, but there were other sounds too: the distant beep of monitors, a murmured conversation, footsteps in the corridor. Every ordinary noise felt loaded with meaning.

“Someone might have lost his or her life,” I thought to myself, imagining disasters that never came. Fear was a greedy animal: it ate the present and swallowed the future.

Dylan reappeared, her face paler than usual. She seemed… withdrawn, as if ink had been sucked out of the color in her cheeks. For a second her words came out in a rush and then slowed. “We might lose someone,” she said, and the sentence hung between us like a verdict.

I didn’t know whose life she meant. My mind stuttered and came to rest on one name: Jack. The thought hit me like a cold draft and I felt heat flare in my throat. I needed to see my family. Badly.

It didn’t matter that they had betrayed me. There are bonds that cut deeper than betrayal, and sometimes the only way to heal is to go back and stand under the rain of it.

“I have to see them,” I told myself aloud, words that felt both foolish and inevitable. I have to go back to them, I repeated, as if the phrase could turn itself into an order.

Then, like a ghost moving across the ward, Jack appeared in the doorway. My heart stuttered and then began to drum. He hadn’t been expecting it.

He looked like he’d been carved out of motion; the suddenness of him was disorienting. For a moment I couldn’t tell whether he was real or a figment of my exhaustion.

My phone exploded with a flurry of alerts messages from both Darius and Jack. I already knew, in the hollow sense that fortune cookies tell truths nobody wants, what Jack’s message would be.

He always had the bluntness to the point. Darius’s call, though his voice had weight; I had to take that one.

I stepped out of the office to answer, trying to find a quieter space. In my haste, I bumped into someone leaving a room and muttered an apology. My pulse rattled so loudly I could almost hear it.

“Hello…” I said into the phone, trying to steady my voice.

“Betty?” Darius’s voice came in, rough around the edges, and for a beat I imagined it could save me from everything. But then there was another voice in the hall nearer, closer and something cold touched the back of my neck. A hand.

I dropped my phone from my ear in shock and turned. The person behind me steadied me gently, their fingers pressing into my wrist. My breath stopped.

I looked up and met Darius’s face standing there, solid, alive, his eyes rimmed red as if he’d been crying. He had come straight from the ward.

A hundred emotions slammed into me at once: surprise, the absurd sweetness of seeing him, the ache of what had happened between us. He took both my hands in one of his and his apology tumbled out before I could process it.

“Please,” he said, voice breaking in a way that made something inside me thump like a trapped bird. “Please, we need you back. Your family needs you. I’m sorry. For everything. For my part.”

His hands were warm and familiar. For an absurd second my head spun with memories of small, softer moments, his laugh over coffee, the way he once steadied me in a hospital corridor as my chest refused to behave.

I didn’t plan to look at him, to let the softness creep in, but his voice had that brittle sweetness that always made me look anyway.

I tried to pull my hands away. I’d rehearsed the move a hundred times in my head, leave, don’t get tangled, don’t go back. But my fingers clung to his palm for a beat longer than I meant to.

The world narrowed to him, to the apology that tasted like regret and hope.

Then something in me rebelled. I pulled my hands free and ran back into Dylan’s office like a woman escaping a sudden storm. Tears stung my eyes but there was anger too, a hot, furious protective thing.

I couldn’t believe the timing, the audacity, the way they wanted me only when everything had been hard and they needed me.

“You guys want me back after everything,” I thought, the words not so much a question as a cracked declaration.

I sat down heavily in the chair, the room spinning a little, and stared at the ceiling. The hospital hummed around me, indifferent and endless.

Outside, life continued, pagers beeped, people moved, babies cried. Inside, decisions stacked up like cards.

They wanted me back, yes. But wanting and deserving are different currencies. I had to figure out which one I could afford.

Whatever I chose next would not be easy. It would mean walking into a past thick with betrayal, or walking away from a family that still, in some messy way, belonged to me.

The plane to Mexico had come and gone. My chance evaporated by rules and health and other people’s judgments. But choices weren’t always about timing; sometimes they were about courage.

I folded my hands in my lap, feeling the rawness where Darius had held me. My phone buzzed again with another message and I realized the story wasn’t over. It was only shifting, rerouting.

My life had never been a straight line. It had always been a tangle. Now, more than ever, I had to choose which strands to pull and which to let fray.

I took a breath, and for the first time in days I felt the thinnest needle of something like purpose pierce the fog. I would go to my family. I would listen. I would test the waters. And if the tide turned dangerous, I knew how to run. I had survi
ved this far. Survival has taught me the shape of my own courage.

So I stood up, smoothed my skirt, and walked back toward the door. Whatever came next, a reconciliation, a confrontation, or something in between I would face it awake.