Chapter 7 - The Warning
That evening Brandon sat in the plastic chair beside his sister’s bed in the pediatric cardiac unit — the chair he’d sat in so many nights that his body knew its exact shape — and he told Sierra she was going to get her surgery.
She didn’t believe him at first. She was fourteen and she had learned, the way sick children learn, not to hope out loud. So he told her again, slowly, and he told her about Mr. Benedict, leaving out the parts a fourteen-year-old didn’t need, and he watched her understand that it was real.
She started to cry, and then he was crying too, and she pressed her face into his shoulder the way she had when she was small, and their mother, who had been standing in the doorway with a cup of vending-machine coffee going cold in her hands, sat down heavily in the other chair and covered her mouth.
For the first time in longer than Brandon could remember, that night, the three of them talked about the future — about the surgery, about after the surgery, about a version of Sierra’s life that had a September in it, and a next year, and a year after that.
Their mother spoke about it without her voice breaking. That, more than anything, told Brandon the ground had actually shifted.
He should have been more careful going home.
Six nights later, walking back from the distribution depot in the flat gray hour before dawn, he cut down the side street he always cut down, and a dark SUV rolled up to the curb behind him.
Two men got out. They wore ski masks, and they moved fast, and before Brandon could do more than turn they had him by the arms and hauled him into the mouth of an alley between two shuttered storefronts.
He fought. It didn’t matter. They were bigger and there were two of them and they knew what they were doing. When it was over he was on the wet pavement with three cracked ribs and blood in his mouth, and one of them crouched down beside him, close, so Brandon would hear every word.
“Sign the renunciation tomorrow,” the man said, unhurried, almost bored. “Give the money back. That’s all you have to do. Sign it, walk away, and none of this happened.”
He paused. “Or next time we don’t come for you. Next time we go visit your little sister. You know the floor she’s on. We know it too. Think about that.”
Then they were up and gone, the SUV pulling away without lights, and the alley was empty and silent except for Brandon’s own breathing, which hurt.
He dragged himself toward the street, one arm wrapped around his ribs, and got his phone out and dialed 911, and as he lay there giving the dispatcher the cross streets between gasps, his free hand brushed something on the asphalt — a second phone, not his, dropped in the struggle.
Its screen was still lit. And as he looked at it, a new message slid down onto the lock screen from a number with no name attached.
May you like
Make sure he gets the point tonight. If he still won’t sign the waiver, you know what to do with the kid at the hospital.
Brandon closed his bloody hand around the phone and did not let go of it, not when the sirens came, not when the paramedics lifted him onto the gurney, not until he could put it into the hand of someone who could use it.
