Throughout the next few weeks Jake only gets worse. It starts with a fever and chills and coughing but by the end of two weeks he can't hold anything down and when he coughs now, its bloody. And I'm scared. More scared than I ever have been in my life. For the first time the stories I tell him at night don't work, he doesn't sleep, and neither do I.
     "Neek?"
     A small hand shakes my shoulder and I turn over, my head like clouds, to find Jake's face inched from mine. His nose is scrunched up and his body is quivering. Immediately I am wide awake, my attempts at resting my eyes forgotten. "You okay champ?" I stroke his hair and sit up, knowing already what's coming.
     "M gonna be sick," his body shudders against mine and I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, pulling his thin frame to mine and leading him to the toilet outside in little room across the hallway. His hair is longer now, almost past his shoulders, and I pull it out of his face as he empties his stomach of the little food he had eaten last night at dinner. Blood stains the water and I swallow back the bile that rises in my own throat. The pain in my leg spikes suddenly and I groan. Jake is shaking and clings to my side as I wipe his face with a towel and hold out a cup for him to wash his mouth out with.
     "Neek?" He asks quietly, and my heart breaks at the sound.
     "Yea champ?"
     "We're gonna be okay right?"
      "Yea buddy," I say, "we're gonna be alright." And I wish I don't have to lie. I wish I don't have to give him false hope, but I am telling a story now, and I don't have the heart to give him a sad ending. 

     The days dwindle by like the leaves outside our window. Each day they fall, more and more until the tree is bare. And each day Jake gets worse and worse until the day comes when he too is like the trees. It is early in the morning, as most tragic things are.

     "Jake?" I snap awake, clambering quickly out of my dream, something is wrong, something is very wrong. My mind is still foggy with sleep but my body screams in alert and I sit up, eyes wild and searching. Is there a storm? No, no wind, fire? No, no heat- I stutter on the thought. No heat, no wind. It is too quiet. It is too cold. "Jake" I turn, my heart sinking already through my ribcage. No wind, no breath, no fire, no life. I lay my hand against his forehead, he is still warm, residual heat trapped still under his skin. His eyes are closed and he is curled limply on his side just how he always sleeps against me. He could be sleeping. But he is not. My stomach drops and my mind spins suddenly off the cliff I have long been running from. Jake. I take his hand, press my fingers to the inside of his wrist but there is nothing, no steady war drum pumping blood through his body. 
     And in that moment the world falls from beneath my feet. The glass castle I had so carefully constructed to keep out the dark, keep of the storm and the rain, keep out the evil. But the walls crack now, not just crack but shatter. They blow apart like shrapnel from a bomb, not slowly, all at once. My heart stops in my chest, my breathing stutters like a broken record as floods pour from my eyes. The glass castle falls, the fairytale ends, and the storm descends.