At eight o'clock sharp, the phone rang again, bursting me out of sleep. I started, knocking my book to the floor, and turned my head just in time to see Susie grab the phone.

"Hello?"

"Yes, this is the Price residence."

"Uh, yeah, she's—wait, you're not named Henry, by any chance, are you?"

"Oh, good. Then yeah, she's here. Do you want to talk to her?"

"I mean, I guessed that you wanted to talk to her, but I thought I'd make sure."

"Cool. Hold on. Flan, it's for you."

I hauled my body off the couch and hobbled over to the phone, mouthing "Who is it?" to my sister before taking the phone away from her. She shrugged, then mouthed "Mrs Bertram?" just in time for me to put the phone to my ear.

I took a deep breath.

"Hello?"

The last time I had been to a hospital had been right before I was sent off to Mansfield. Edwina had taken me—I was a ward of the state at that point—and a doctor had examined me. He had had greying hair and glasses, and had tried to get me to smile, but the years and my anxiety had erased everything else. Besides, I'd been too nervous to look at him directly.

Mass General is a grander building than you might expect. The older part of it is vaguely reminiscent of the White House, with its doric column and its stone steps. The newer wing looks like something from Metropolis, all deco glasswork with large gradations, like a giant's staircase, cut into the side. Walking up to it, I couldn't help feeling both overwhelmed and mystified. Additions on grand public buildings had gone from needing to be indistinguishable from the original building to being glaringly, obviously, different, but it could just as easily go back.

Susie bumped into me from behind when I slowed to a halt, and she pushed me along impatiently. She had insisted on coming, said there wasn't anything else to do, and nothing I could say could put her off. She'd heard about Tom before, in the few stories I'd told her about Mansfield. Tom had been a safe subject.

When we got to the reception area, Susie grabbed my hand and tried to get around concierge by virtue of her confident attitude, but I stopped her, pulling her instead to a pinch-faced woman at the front desk. Susie rolled her eyes and stuck her hands deep in her sweatshirt pockets, standing behind me and very probably glowering as the now-annoyed concierge took down my information.

"Thomas Samuel Bertram…" she scanned her screen. "ICU. You wanted to visit him?" Her voice was nasal and clipped with no discernible accent. I could just imagine Susie's impersonation of her. I had to get her away from the desk before she did it for the woman's benefit.

"Yes." Susie huffed in impatience behind me, probably suppressing a sarcastic comment.

"Family only. You're family?"

"He's my cousin." She took than down, then waved us at the elevator, giving vague directions.

Once the doors had closed, Susie piped up. "You're going to hell."

"How so?" I leaned against the back wall.

"Lying's a sin, Flan. Not religious, and even I know that."

"Yeah, well, estranged foster sister doesn't have quite the same ring to it."

We fell silent for a moment. The elevator slowed to a stop.

"Are you ever gonna tell me what it was like there?" The doors opened, and I threw a glance at her before I stepped out.

"Maybe. Probably."

She huffed again, slouching behind me as we made our way down the hallway. There were arrows pointing the way to different sets of rooms, so that even in the bland, near-identical passageways we were able to find our way without much trouble. I paused for a moment, a few feet from Tom's door, taking a breath to steady myself. Susie was quiet next to me. Maybe her silence was anticipation, maybe it was concern for me. I don't know; I didn't turn around.

When I stepped in view of the room, the first thing I saw was Tom, ghost-white on the hospital bed, his skin easily as pale as his sheets and hospital gown. He looked like he'd lost about twenty pounds, with his bones sticking out of his skin. His shock of chestnut hair stood out as the only remotely vivid thing about him, and even that was limp with grease and neglect. The blood seemed to be hiding from his skin entirely. By contrast, Ned's hand, clutching Tom's on the bed, looked hale and hearty.

Ned. He had turned at the movement in the doorway, and now sat frozen in his chair, staring at us with wide eyes. I studied him, saw the dark circles under his eyes, the crease in the middle of the forehead, the tightness in his jaw.

"Flannery." His voice was quiet.

"Ned." I couldn't look at him, and I couldn't quite look away. I examined the room, the bed, the window, the curtains, his face, his posture, his clothes. I moved aside to let Susie into the room, and a blankness I didn't like descended on Ned's face before it cleared and he smiled.

"You must be Susie."

"Yeah," she said, and though her voice was rougher than either of ours, she followed our lead and spoke quietly. "That's me. But who are you?"

The smile slid off Ned's face and he nodded. He turned his face to mine, but I was too busy looking at my hands and at Tom's face and at the sun shining through the window. There was a vase of flowers on a small table by the door. Did the hospital provide flowers to rooms? That was probably too expensive.

"I'm Ned," his voice came behind me. He cleared his throat. "Tom's brother. It's nice to finally meet you." He must have shaken her hand.

"Yeah, you too. Except, I mean, I've heard of Tom, right, and all his—I mean, your sisters, I guess, but I don't think I've ever heard of you."

"I haven't talked much about anyone," I said, raising my eyes to the popcorn ceiling tiles.

"I mean, yeah. But still—"

"Suze." She stopped. I finally turned around to see Susie staring down at her shoes, her ears red with anger or embarrassment or both. Ned was watching me like I was a bomb about to go off.

"Sorry." I took a deep breath, then gestured to a chair. "Let's try this again. Suze, you can sit here."

She shook her head. "I'm going to go get some hot chocolate. I saw a Starbucks outside."

"There's a cafeteria, too." But she wrinkled her nose and rolled her eyes. "Do you have money?"

"Yes, mom. I'll be gone for a few minutes. Bring you guys back something, yeah?" She was out the door before either of us could say anything. There were several breaths' worth of silence as Ned watched me and I leaned against the wall and watched Tom breathe. He made a barrier between Ned and me, and I was shamefully grateful for it.

So I breathed, and breathed some more.

"How are you?" Ned was blinking at the blanket that covered Tom's legs.

"You don't call, you don't write."

He glanced at me, then away again. "You look wonderful."

I studied him again. There were new lines around his eyes. The familiar crinkle in his forehead seemed to be permanent now. His cheekbones were more pronounced, and the dark circles under his eyes greatly resembled bruises. Was all this the work of only one night?

"You look terrible."

He looked at me sharply, but then he was laughing in a burst of breath, and he bent his head closer to Tom's bed as if in prayer.

"I guess I must." He looked back up at me, and I found suddenly that I had nothing left to say. We sat in silence for a moment, and it was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable.

"Thank you for coming," his voice was a whisper.

"You did the same thing for me once."

Twice. A hundred times.

"That was…" He trailed off, unwilling to finish that thought. My mind supplied possible conclusions into the following silence. Different. Before. Easy. Maybe all of those. Maybe none.

"What happened?" Tom's machine beeped, acknowledging his heartbeat, announcing it to the room.

Ned cleared his throat. "He was on a long bender. Wasn't eating, barely sleeping. Yates didn't notice. No one noticed. Or cared. He lost control one night, fell down some stairs, then got into a fight at a bar and collapsed. Renal failure, severe dehydration. Risk of cirrhosis. Liver disease. We're still watching it to make sure. He fractured his hip when he fell. Apparently he lost some bone mass when…well."

Tom's face, so pale on his pillow. His cheekbones were jutting out, his skin sallow. The years had been hard on these two. Ned was blinking again, and he wouldn't look at me. I took a step away from the wall, then another, and reached out to put a hand on my shoulder. He let out another breath, then another, and I felt a shudder go through his body. I stepped closer and put my arms around his shoulders. His body felt smaller than it had before; he felt thin against my chest, almost frail. There was much less of him now than there had been before. Something else was wrong, and it had been for a long time.

He put his hand on my arms, pulling them closer. His body shuddered again and again, and I held him tighter until he turned in my arms and threw his own around me. I sat on the foot of Tom's bed to make it easier on both of us. He was weeping openly now, but quietly, reservedly. If Tom had been watching, if he could have seen, he would have been exasperated.

"I'm sorry," he said it into my shoulder. "I'm so sorry." A sob racked his body.

I started to cry, then, too. He repeated himself, stroking my hair with one hand, rubbing my back with the other. Trying to comfort me while he was sobbing.

"You left me," I whispered. I hadn't meant to say anything. "You left me."

His arms tightened around me and then we were rocking back and forth, though whether he had started it or I had, I couldn't say.

"I'm sorry," he whispered again. "I love you, I'm so sorry."

We stopped, eventually. Eventually I pried myself away from him, and sat looking at his face, his puffy eyes, his creased forehead. I could look at him openly now, and he didn't seem to be having any trouble either.

He brushed a strand of hair off my face. "How did you find out?"

I pulled away from his hand a little, and he let it fall in his lap without comment. "Your mom called."

"She did? She's full of surprises." He ran his hands over his face and into his hair in a gesture that was so familiar that my heart turned over. I'd forgotten he did that.

I shrugged. "She's worried."

We watched each other for a second.

"You look really bad, you know." His eyebrows shot up in surprise, and he laughed again, though it seemed less painful this time.

"I know. Grad school does that, apparently. I had a professor tell us that three hours of sleep a night and a cup of rice and beans a day is a noble sacrifice. I'm not sure."

"Sounds nonsensical."

His grin was thin, but it was a grin. "Yes, it does."

"You're almost done, though, right?"

He sighed. "Almost."

There was an obvious line of questioning there, but I ignored it and we sat in silence. Tom's machine beeped, and the sun went behind a cloud.

"How are you?" I turned back to meet his eyes. He watched me for a moment. "Are you happy?"

I had to take a deep breath to answer that question. "Yeah. I am." He didn't speak—he just looked at me, waiting, maybe, for more. "I'm in school right now. Architecture program."

A slow, sweet smile lit up his face, a smile that would have melted me into a puddle three years ago. "You're doing it."

I shrugged. "Slowly. Very, very slowly."

"You're still doing it."

We looked at each other silently again, knee to knee, hands in our own laps.

"Thank you for coming," he said again, this time to his interlaced fingers. "I don't think I could have-" he looked at Tom, then reached out for a moment to touch his brother's hand. It hurt to look at the two of them. I couldn't think how Tom had ever thought that Ned didn't care about him.

"Have you been here all night?"

He nodded. "I've been in Boston since Thursday." He had the grace to look sheepish. "I was trying to find him," he gestured to Tom. "He'd been gone for months, no calls, no check-ins, not even with Mom, so I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know where he was exactly until he called me one night."

"Drunk?"

Ned nodded. "Out of his mind. So I tried to find him, but couldn't until Yates called me. Apparently he thought it would be faster to drive Tom to the hospital himself, but he hit a curb and bloodied his temple and…well, here we are."

A nurse stepped into the room. "Ah, company!" She smiled down at Ned. "Good. I was starting to worry we'd have to clear a bed for you. Gloria," she said, holding out her hand.

"Flannery," I said, and we shook hands. "You've been here all night, too?"

"Forty-eight-hour shifts, honey," she said, coming over to check on Tom. "Are you sitting on his legs?" I rose to show her that his legs were safe, and she chuckled. "Just giving you a hard time. Ned, honey, you should get some sleep."

"I'll sleep when you do," he said, and even though he was smiling, we could all hear the exhaustion in his voice.

"Oh, so you're sleeping right now, pretending to be awake. Just like me. Well, he's looking okay over here. We're going to have to do some check-ins on his liver and kidneys. He should be good on dialysis for a couple days, but hopefully his kidneys'll kick in in a little bit, so we won't have to keep doing it over and over."

I glanced at Ned, and then back to Gloria. "Do you think he'll be okay?" Ned shifted back in his seat, taking a deep breath. I reached for his hand, held it in mine. Gloria noticed but didn't bat an eyelash.

"It's probably unprofessional of me to tell you this, but I think he will be. I mean, still early days, blah blah blah, and there's risk of a lot of different kinds of complications, from cirrhosis to pneumonia to brittle bones, but he's young and has a long history of proper nutrition and exercise and he has family who, frankly, have the money to take care of him. So I really can't say that he'll be okay, but you know, shine bright, shine far, be a star."

I laughed. Ned didn't. Gloria straightened and said, a little more soberly, "I've seen a lot of people in really bad shape. A lot of hopeless cases come through here. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk, here, but I am very hopeful. And I hope you'll be hopeful, too."

Ned's hand was trembling. I held it tighter. "Thank you, Gloria."

Gloria left us, and we sat frozen for a moment. Ned stirred himself to speak. "You've changed." There was a smile on the edge of his lips, but it was faint.

I smiled back. "Yeah, I'm taller."

"Taller?"

"A couple inches, at least."

"Oh, wow. Now that's an achievement."

"Yeah, I thought you'd be proud."

"Oh, definitely. Very, very proud."

When Susie came back, holding a cup holder with our coffee, Ned and I were silent, hand in hand, watching Tom sleep.