My mind remained unfocused through the entire flight from Seattle to San Jose but I convinced myself that until I heard news about Dad that said otherwise, he was fine. If I thought at all, even voiced a tiny, miniscule inner question, then I knew I'd have spiraled downward into the worst 'what if?' scenarios of Dad's conditions.

In other words, I fought one of the biggest mental battles against my tendency to overthink in my life. My only line of defense was a constant stream of positivity and ignored the fact I was blissfully ignorant and potentially set myself up for a hard fall..

I'll apologize as soon as I see him. People bounce back after heart attacks all the time.

He'll be fine...

The unfortunate timing of Mom's call, on Thanksgiving Day, meant the only available direct flight Charlie found was a Southwest red-eye flight that left SeaTac at eleven-ten pm. In between two empty seats on a sparsely attended flight, I rested my head back against my navy-blue leather seat and closed my eyes, although I felt anything but tired.

At the risk that I angered the flight attendants and pilot over electronic device usage, I'd turned my phone back on, but hadn't received any new updates.

No news is good news. He's being taken care of in the hospital, he's fine.

Desperate for a diversion, any diversion, my lower lip rolled under and I chewed on it until the skin felt raw and exposed and opened my eyes. I looked around the airplane cabin at the few other passengers as they slept, from a Mom curled around her young daughter, a younger couple pressed against each other's shoulder, and a businessman whose neck craned back so far that mine pinched in sympathy.

Since I knew sleep was impossible, I ran through the best mental distraction I came up with and created made-up scenarios for why anyone else was on this flight.

The woman and her daughter caught an earlier flight to meet her Daddy earlier as a surprise.

The businessman just aced his work proposal but his startup is pinching pennies so he's flying the red-eye.

The couple are eloping in secret.

At the last thought, a humorless smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. I rested my elbow on the hard plastic under the window on my right, cupped my chin in my palm, and sighed..

A quick glance out the window showed a black night dotted full of white, shining stars. The familiar cloud cover that grayed most of Seattle nestled beneath us and the faint glow from a slivered moon cast highlights and shadows across the pillowy forms beneath us.

I'd silenced my phone but, like an addict, checked it every thirty seconds with first a check of how much flight time remained and any texted updates. My only messages were from Logan, all of which I appreciated but none I replied to.

Logan: Thinking about you, praying for the best.
Logan: Call me when you arrive, no matter what time.

Logan: I've got a flight booked that leaves 90min after tomorrow's game.
Logan: Love you, baby. ❤️

Finally, my eyes drooped closed and I pinched the bridge of my nose between them with my thumb and forefinger. An undetermined amount of time later, a slight jolt jarred my attention, as did the quietly murmured conversations, rustled movements of stretches and seatbelt clicks, and clunky sounds of luggage retrieval around me.

Once I grabbed my overhead suitcase, I followed the small passenger queue off the plane and threaded through the sparsely attended corridors at San Jose International Airport. The lack of traffic made the high, curved ceilings even more voluminous than I remembered, up-lit with lights and stark white against the black night sky in the windows. In return, I felt even smaller and more insignificant than when I'd left Seattle.

After a short walk around the airport's wide corridors, the only thing my tired eyes focused on was the tall, dark-haired guy who stood with his back towards the gate exits. His arms crossed over his chest, which showed the ripples of his shoulder and back muscles through his T-shirt. The back of that dark brown-haired head I knew anywhere but my voice failed me as I croaked out a broken, "Jake."

I wasn't sure if Jake heard me since I barely heard my dry and cracked voice, felt my gaze, or sensed my approach, but he turned around. His eyes stared at me without a blink, the whites a slight red at the corners and his dark brown irises so dark they looked black, before his mouth twitched into a tight smile.

My heart dropped as my feet moved me closer and bridged the gap between us. My brother's silence was worse than any reassuring words, broken only by the sound of my dropped suitcase on the cement airport floors as I flung my arms around him.

A warm hand pressed around the side of my face and tugged me into the center of his chest, where his heart beat rapidly into my ear and his fingers trembled in my hair.

"Ellie," he whispered and tugged me closer. "He's okay, he's in the hospital."

While Jake offered no information past what I'd already known, relief trickled through my body like water in the shower. My shoulders and spine sagged, which melted me into Jake's strong embrace.

"Thank you," I whispered as the tears I'd held bad for two hours broke through my dam of resistance, trailed over my cheeks, and dotted his shirt. "I need to see him."

With a stiff spine, Jake reached down, pulled my suitcase up by the handle, and grasped my hand in his. He led me through the airport, beneath the modern architectural entrance that had always looked like giant pieces of paper folded over the roof, and into a parking garage, where we climbed into his white Mazda 6. With each year that Jake kept this car, it definitely looked more like a beater but I comfortably slid into the worn gray leather on the front passenger's seat and threw my brother a grateful smile when he shut my door.

The car ride from the airport to what I assumed was a local hospital tortured me far more than the plane ride had. I discarded my Thanksgiving plate once I'd gotten Mom's news and now my empty stomach lurched with every dip or pothole Jake drove over until nausea threatened me with dry heaves.

Only the warmth and strength of Jake's hand sandwiched between my damp palms on the center console kept me grounded. My heart thumped so violently in my chest, I was surprised it hadn't broken through my sternum. Mom's side of the family was Catholic and I prayed over and over that Dad comfortably rested and offered his lopsided grin once he saw me again in person.

Once Jake pulled onto a four-lane highway, the view of the lanes and traffic blurred from my view. I only heard the hums of his car's tires on the pavement behind the strummed pulses of my own heartbeat in my ears. The skin on my forearms and up the back of my neck raised with goosebumps when a blue 'H' sign came into view on the side of the exit.

"He's there," Jake murmured softly once the view of a U-shaped, peach cement-colored building with a large silver cross and name 'O'Connor Hospital' came into view. "Do you want me to drop you off or go in with you?"

"Stay with me," I whisper-pleaded and squeezed his hand so tight that the tips of my fingers pulsed with each elevated heartbeat.

"Of course," he assured me with a wistful smile. While he circled around the visitor parking lot, his eyes darted between his search for an available spot and me. I kept my eyes out the front windshield and scanned for an open spot but still felt the heaviness of his gaze every few minutes.

Once Jake's car lurched to a stop and he turned it off, a slow, deep breath failed against the near-painful pounds of my heart, the shivers that quaked down my spine, and the tension that knotted the muscles in my neck and shoulders. The echoes of our door slams over the empty parking garage were the only sound between.

The reality that Dad had passed out during a family Thanksgiving dinner with Mom's side of the family hit me when I saw the small mob of Italians gathered in the hospital's reception area. My eyes glazed over the sea of dark-haired heads, some more thinned out and tinted with gray as the years passed but most of them still named Anthony. Since my throat squeezed in on itself, I just offered one pathetic hand wave after another while Jake and I walked straight up to the reception desk.

"May I help you again, Jake?" A young girl with black hair pulled into a tight bun looked up at us from behind her glasses. Her lashes fluttered slightly at Jake and normally I would've gagged at the reaction but tonight I was thankful he took the lead in the conversation.

"She needs to see Dale Harrison," he said in a flat voice. "Family."

"Right, yeah." She waved at the lobby behind us. "Everyone's family."

"We're both his kids," Jake blurted out in a tone with equal parts irritation and insistence while his fingers drummed on the counter.

"ID please, Miss," she replied in a cool, casual tone, inspected the license I handed to her, then typed away at her computer keyboard. With a quick slide of my ID back, she directed us with a pointed finger, "He was moved to room two-ten while you were gone, elevator upstairs is down on the left."

"Thanks," Jake muttered, wrapped his arm around my shoulders, and steered me where she'd pointed.

Our footsteps down the tile hallways deafened the silence between us, as did the soft click when Jake pushed the elevator button.

Since the silence stifled me the longer we stood in it, I asked Jake, "How long have you been here?"

"He collapsed around three pm, Mom called me then," he explained with averted eyes. At his words, I noticed his T-shirt was a USC Trojans and his pants looked like athletic ones. "I left practice, caught a direct flight from LA and got here at six. Mom rode in the ambulance after he collapsed, but like you saw in the lobby, everyone else from Aunt Maria's followed."

After a quick glance at the 1:23am time on my phone, my mind ran through the time crunch possibilities.

Six... Jake was here for seven hours?

"And Dad -" My voice dried up and choked off my words.

"Was sedated around midnight but..." Jake's hard swallow paused his unspoken 'still alive' words. I grabbed his hand when we exited the elevator and took in a quieter floor with a similar layout with no reception area and endless hallways of closed doors.

A blonde-haired girl with crystal-blue eyes smiled brightly at Jake and sat upright at our approach. Her eyes never looked away from him once as she giggled softly. "Can I help you?"

"Please," Jake mumbled in a thankfully bored tone of voice then handed her his ID. I slipped mine on top but she still ignored my presence until he added, "Jake and Eleanor Harrison to see our dad, Dale in two-ten."

"Hang on a moment, the on-call surgeon rushed in there a few moments ago," she murmured and glanced over her screen but Jake and I had already stepped in the direction the signs pointed to Rooms 200-10.

"Hey, wait!" she called behind us but Jake's long strides dragged me down the hall until we stood in front of the closed door of Room 210. With one hand tightly squeezed around mine, Jake turned the door handle and palmed the door with the other.

The smells of antiseptic and bleach-based cleaners cringed my nose first and my feet carried me one step behind Jake into the room. His broad frame took up most of my line of vision but the warmth and faint scent of his shower wash and cologne offered slight comforts.

I peeked around Jake and the sight of Mom's frame, hunched over a white-linen hospital bed rushed more relief through me than I thought humanly possible. The ache in my tensed limbs lessened, my jumbled thoughts cleared, and I rushed to Dad's bedside. He laid rested, partially propped up in a reclined seated position, his face relaxed and sleep-like.

My eyes took in every detail they rested on. A white linen sheet was pulled over most of Dad's reclined frame but folded down and draped to his chest level. Mom's normally perfectly styled shoulder-length dark brown hair was tied back in a messy ponytail at the nape of her neck.

The closer Jake and I approached, the more the eerie silence in the room enveloped around us. Not a single machine beeped or hummed, although Dad was hooked up to a few sensors. A cardiac machine sat near the corner of his bed but the screen was completely black.

That's weird, for someone who came in with a heart attack.

As Jake and I rounded the foot of Dad's bed, my eyes shifted to Mom. Streams of tears ran down her cheeks, which glistened under the dull overhead lighting as she tipped her chin into her chest. Her eyes were closed, palms pressed together over her lap, and lips moved in a silent prayer.

Mom's shoulder flinched when Jake disentangled his hand from mine, and rested it on her shoulder. Her eyes, red-rimmed and glossed over, met mine and her lips parted like she wasn't sure I was actually present.

The white, sterile walls pressed in on me when I sat down between Mom and Dad and studied his stilled form. My aged, stubborn father laid silently, his skin a shade paler, and his body showed no signs he acknowledged our presence. A chilling sense ran down my spine and a heavy weight pressed into my already nauseous stomach at how still he laid in the bed.

It's like he's not even -

A cough and cleared throat snapped all three of our heads up to the door, where a doctor in green scrubs and a severe frown on his face looked over us. "I'm sorry but you can't be in here anymore."

The doctor's presence drew my awareness back to Dad's still, no lifeless, form on the bed. I reached out and grabbed one of his faintly warm hands, threaded our fingers together, and squeezed tightly. His only reaction was his arm fell limply down to his side and my eyes widened the more the gravity of the situation sank in.

No.

NO.

He can't be...

The longer I stared at his still form, the more my insides caved in on themselves, which became nothing but an empty cavern of blackness, devoid of all feeling other than a sensation I was sucked down like I was caught in an invisible riptide. As I drowned within the gravity of the situation, I couldn't breathe or think. My brain no longer possessed the capacity that accepted the possibility that I existed in this world without my dad anymore.

NO!!

Silent screams tore through my mind as I mentally begged and pleaded that Dad's eyes sprung open, a laugh escaped his mouth, and this nightmare was all a joke.

Without a second thought, I hugged myself against Dad's chest, partially exposed by the opening in his hospital gown, right over a large surgical bandage. My ear pressed into the soft, gray hairs in his chest and tears flooded out my eyes as I searched for his heartbeat... searched over and over with my ear pressed in different locations around the bandage, but found none.

Oh gawd.

A pair of arms wrapped around my chest and, with one tug, I recoiled into Mom's embrace. Her soft skin pressed into my cheek and reassuring beats of her pulse throbbed in my ear drum.

"No," I whimpered softly into her chest. "He can't. I'm here... I'm sorry Dad."

"He's gone, Ellie," she whispered as dotted splashes on my cheek revealed her tears had fallen and intermixed with mine. I reared back and stared into her eyes, identical in color and pain that welled inside me, for any sign other than her simple but awful three words.

Jake's expression darkened the longer as the room's silence won over again but his eyes glassed over. Before his tears fell, he turned, stepped back into a corner of the room, and palmed his forehead. He murmured a few words over and over, most of which were out of my hearing range from how loudly a ringing sound pierced my ears, but I caught a few 'I just saw him' phrases leaked out between Jake's soft sobs.

The sight of Dad's still form hadn't cemented in the reality of the situation for me, but the view of my broken down brother tore into me. I clung tightly to Mom's form, where I breathed in her scent of perfume mixed faintly with remnants of Thanksgiving dinner, notably my aunt's mimosas. Violent, uncontrolled sobs wracked through my body and my shoulders to hips shook until a warm hand rested on my shoulder.

"I'm so very sorry," the doctor repeated in a sympathetic but professional tone of voice. "You can't be in here anymore."

"No," I whispered into Mom's chest and bit back the trembles in my lips. "No."

"Ellie," she whispered and smoothed one hand through my hair, up from the crown of my head to the base of my skull, then back on repeat. "He's gone, Ellie."