Chapter 2
He could not understand how something so horrible as death could happen to a man twice in such a short number of years, but he felt the familiarity of fear clutch his heart when he had driven to the summer estate his father had currently fallen ill in. Doctors had told the family that it was out of their control, that because of his father's line of work there was nothing they could do but put him in a comatose state to relieve the man of his impending misery.
And here he was now, sitting silently at his father's bedside in his parent's old bedroom. The thick color of the mahogany walls made the unconscious man look small, pale, and weak. The man he once knew to be tall and proud now croaked with each shaky breath he inhaled in his dreamless sleep.
Rainier slipped his own lanky hand under his father's, feeling his past. The hand that held him when he was so small, the doctors did not know if he would survive the night. The hand that steadied him when he got his first bicycle. The hand that shook his at his graduation. The hand that...
The plug.
Rainier stood silently and left the room. The echos of his shoes louder than his father's loosely connected heart monitor.