by K. A. Hobbs
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written consent from the author, except that of small quotations used in critical reviews and promotions via blogs.
To Where You Are is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
TO WHERE YOU ARE ©2018 H.A. Robinson and K.A. Hobbs
Cover design by Peter Carruthers
Book design and formatting by Champagne Book Design
Editing by Eleanor Lloyd Jones of Schmidt’s Author Services
Proof reading by Mike Ross
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
To Where You Are Playlist
For everybody who ever lost a part of themselves, and for our angels, Becky and Emma, who brought us together, wrapped us up tight in their wings and helped us to find our missing pieces.
Scared to death.
I try to suck in a breath only to swallow another mouthful of water. I can’t help but think scared to death is a pretty accurate description of how some of us meet our ends.
I meet his eyes and regret it the minute I do.
His pupils are dilated, a look of grotesque enjoyment painting his features.
What kind of sicko is this guy? And why did he have to pick me?
I feel my body getting tired.
Everything burns.
There’s no doubt in my mind that these are my last few minutes on this earth.
I’m suddenly thinking the most ridiculous things—things like how I’ll never again walk to Starbucks to get a coffee. I’ll miss the way they always get just the right vanilla syrup to coffee ratio.
My mind goes into overdrive while I continue to fight the beast trying to put an end to my life.
My brain conjures up images of life events I’ll never get to experience.
I’ll never get married.
I’ll never hold my baby in my arms.
I’ll never get to spend New Year’s Eve in Times Square like Olivia and I have always planned.
Olivia.
I can’t leave her.
The mere thought of her has me lashing out, a new sense of determination flowing through my veins.
The sick bastard above me laughs, an evil, laugh that makes my heart race. He’s getting way too much enjoyment from this.
I almost want to vomit.
But it’s impossible.
It happens quickly; my body loses its fight and my lungs burn, causing black spots to appear in my vision, My heart thunders against my ribs, desperately clinging to the final threads of life.
I look up into the face of the devil himself and close my eyes, letting my mind drift into the black oblivion wrapping its hands around me.
I stop struggling and embrace death like an old friend, desperate to be free from the pain.
I think of Olivia.
And then I think of nothing.
Life
Noun
The existence of an individual human being or animal.
Synonyms
person, human being, individual, mortal, soul, creature
There’s nothing exceptional about February 23rd.
If you ask most people what they were doing on December 25th on any given year, they’ll probably be able to tell you. But ask them about February 23rd and they’ll likely look at you blankly.
It was the same for me until today. I can’t tell you what I was doing this time last year, but when I woke up this morning, grunted at the alarm clock and crawled my way to the coffee machine, I had no idea that this would be the day when everything changed. If I’d known I’d wind up sitting curled into a cold, uncomfortable plastic chair, gripping onto the sides for dear life as the world tilted on its axis around me, plunging me into darkness, I would have pressed snooze one more time and enjoyed the warmth of my husband’s body pressed against mine. I would have held him tighter, kissed him harder and stared into his soft brown eyes for longer.
There’s a clock hanging on the wall right above my chair, ticking obnoxiously loudly in the awkward silence. Hospital waiting rooms are like that. You’d think there’d be some sort of sense of community, a shared pain or something, binding the inhabitants of the cold, sterile room together in some way. But it never seems to be like that. Perhaps everybody is so lost in their own story, their own reason for being there, that the others in the room don’t even register.
The chairs are red, which strikes me as ironic. I suppose if you’re going to bleed out in the waiting room, though, red is the best colour. The walls are littered with posters about various ailments, scaring people into visiting their doctors with a whole host of symptoms that could either be the common cold or a deadly strain of ebola that will destroy the human race within the month.
Ben doesn’t have a cold.
I remember last summer when he had a rare and devastating strain of man flu that forced him to take to his bed and have me run around after him like a slave for an entire week. I kept telling him to man up and admit it was just a cold, but he enjoyed me mopping his fevered brow way too much for that.
What I wouldn’t give to mop his brow right now. What I wouldn’t give to even clap eyes on it. Last time I saw him, they were wheeling him away from me through pair of swinging doors, shouting words I had no hope of understanding while machines attached to his battered body bleeped loudly enough to penetrate the ringing in my ears.
I’ve been staring at those doors ever since, my eyes fixed on the glass as though I can will him to walk back through them with only the power of my desperation. He’ll laugh at my serious expression, tell me I worry too much, and then we’ll pick up Chinese food on the way home. Enough for at least three days, of course. Because what’s the point in getting take out if you can’t feasibly feed an army with the leftovers? I’ll have my usual garlic chicken and he’ll moan all night about how much my breath stinks, and by the time we roll into bed together, this nightmare will be a distant memory.
I’m still lost in my wishful daydream when a warm hand closes around my stone cold one. I blink back into the room and find myself staring into the only other pair of eyes in the world that could possibly make me feel any better right now.
“Mum,” I whisper, falling forwards into arms I know will catch me. Warmth infuses my body as her hug envelops me, and I breathe in her familiar soapy scent as though it holds the secret to fixing this.
“What happened, Molly?” she questions, her voice soft, but she can’t hide the slight quiver as sh
e releases me and drops into a crouch in front of me.
“Th-there was an accident. I think… I think we hit… I don’t even know.” The final words erupt out of me accompanied by a sob. I can’t control it. I’ve been shrouded in numbness since the moment the car careered off the road, as though watching my life through a lens, not living it. But with my mum’s hands resting on my knees, her patient, caring eyes waiting on my explanation, the pain of the last few hours finally cuts through the haze, and agony rips through my body like a knife through butter.
“You’re hurt,” Mum murmurs, her eyes drifting to the cut above my eye. I can’t even feel it. A nurse tried to clean it up, mentioning something about stitches, when I first arrived, but I won’t go anywhere with anybody until they let me see Ben. Dragging my eyes from that door to focus on my mum is hard enough because that’s where he’ll come from when he saunters in, giving me grief for being a sap and allowing myself to cry in public.
“Finally cracked the ice queen,” he’ll joke with that cheeky wink of his that melts my knees clean away every single time. I almost smile, thinking back to the day early in our relationship when he discovered my inability to cry in public and decided to take it as a personal challenge. We spent an entire day cuddled up on his couch watching sad movie after sad movie, and I never shed a single tear. Not even Bambi broke me. And ever since that day, Ben has affectionately dubbed me the ice queen.
And here I am now with tears stinging at my eyes, just waiting to fall. I’d give anything to go back to this morning when my car wouldn’t start. Only this time, instead of flying back into the bedroom, dragging my poor sleeping husband from his bed and begging him to drive me into work, I’d simply crawl back under the covers with him and stay there all day. Work would just have to get by without me because no job in the world could ever be worth sitting here in this increasingly uncomfortable chair, waiting to hear whether the man I love with everything I am is going to be okay.
“I’m fine,” I whisper eventually when Mum’s gaze doesn’t lower from my forehead. I know it looks bad. People in the waiting room have been casting glances at it since the moment I dropped into the seat, but I don’t have it in me to give a damn. It can turn black and fester for all I care if he isn’t okay. My world means nothing without him in it. He brought me to life, gave me the wings I’d denied myself for years, and encouraged me to fly with them. I never would have started my PGCE if it hadn’t been for his relentless nagging and support. Dream chasing was just something other people did until he bounded into my life full of joie de vivre and ready to take on anything.
“No, you’re not,” my mum counters, slipping onto the seat beside me and taking my hand in hers, squeezing lightly. “But you will be.”
Time drags by so slowly that I start to wonder whether I’m lost in some sort of loop, living the same interminable seconds over and over, somehow expecting them to be different each time. Whenever somebody comes through those doors, I stiffen, waiting for them to tell me what’s going on, but nobody comes. My backside grows as numb as my mind while my mum sits beside me, a silent support, holding me up when I want to fall.
The clock ticks on relentlessly, though the hands seem to barely move. Perhaps if I can convince them to go backwards, I can stop this from ever happening.
By the time the door finally swings open and the eyes of a familiar man in dark green scrubs and a white coat meet my own, I’m almost sure I’m imagining it. He moves towards me with purpose, but I barely register his proximity. All I can see is the look of abject defeat in his eyes that tells me everything I need to know before he even opens his mouth.
Ice cold dread flows down my spine as my mum’s grip on my hand tightens.
She knows.
We both do.
Doctors don’t come out to give good news with grim faces. His white coat is so clean it practically shines under the fluorescent lights, and I fleetingly wonder how much of Ben’s blood is hidden underneath. There was so much of it. When I came around in the car with half the shattered windscreen embedded in my skin, I couldn’t even see his face for all the sinister red that seemed to cover him from head to toe. As though my nerves have been asleep since the moment of impact, they spring sharply to life at the memory. My mouth dries up when the pain hits, leaving me unable to plead with the doctor not to say the words I know are coming.
I hate the pitying look he gives me when he says my name softly.
“Mrs. Sparrow?”
I nod mutely, the rest of my body frozen in place.
“Would you like to follow me please?”
The childish part of me that still thinks if I hide behind my hands, people won’t be able to see me, wants to refuse. If I don’t go with him, he can’t tell me anything bad, and if he can’t tell me anything bad, nothing bad can have happened.
“Come on, Molly, sweetheart.” Mum’s grip leaves my hand, leaving me adrift for just a moment, floating untethered in a sea of despair until she’s standing beside me and tugging on my arm to convince me I need to do the same. I obey reluctantly, my body stiff from both the uncomfortable chair and its unwillingness to hear what the doctor has to say.
I find myself being gently led into a small room with soft chairs seated round a small table that holds nothing but a single box of tissues. My eyes zone in on the box as panic seizes hold of me and my bones begin to shake. They only ever take you into rooms with comfy chairs and tissues when they’re about to bring your world crashing down around you. I’ve seen enough episodes of Casualty to know that.
I drop into one of the doomed chairs stiffly, waiting blankly for him to speak. Bright green eyes filled with compassion blink at me as the doctor hesitates. He doesn’t want to have this conversation any more than I do, I realise, and just for a moment, I feel a jolt of pity for this stranger whose job throws him into this awful position constantly. Ben is just a name on a chart to him, though, a statistic in the great scheme of things. To me, he’s a million smiles, days spent curled together in bed, our bodies entwined. He’s bad jokes and coffee breath and days by the sea. He’s laughter, companionship, snuggles on rainy days and ice cream sundaes in summer. He’s inky fingers and the smell of dusty old books, the reassuring tapping of computer keys and thousands of sentences all winding together until they form captivating stories people want to read. He’s my everything. My world. A world I can feel starting to tilt off its axis and into the dark abyss with every breath I drag in in this awful, sterile room.
“Mrs. Sparrow—”
“Molly,” I bark out pointlessly, delaying the inevitable. “It’s Molly.”
“Molly,” he repeats softly, his voice tinged with an edge of sadness that I feel cutting into my soul painfully. “As you know, your husband was involved in an accident earlier tonight. He sustained major injuries that our team have been working tirelessly to try to get under control. Unfortunately—”
“Stop. P-please. I can’t do this.” I leap from my chair as though it’s burning my skin and stare down at him as he watches me with concern. His fingers twitch against his knees as I glare, irrationally angry at him, as though it’s his fault and not my own.
He looks back at me, aghast, his eyes crinkling into a frown, and when he pushes out of the chair, for a moment I think he’s going to hug me. And then a more familiar pair of arms engulfs me and I collapse against my mother’s chest, burying my face in her neck and breathing in her familiar perfume as the doctor speaks meaningless words behind me. I don’t need to listen. I already know.
He’s gone.
The man who brought sunshine into my life, who made me laugh every day and gave me a reason to get out of bed each morning is gone.
I wait for pain to engulf me, to drown in a wave of grief, but all I feel is a strange, eerie sort of numbness, like I’m floating above the room in a bubble that nothing can penetrate, looking down on the scene and not a part of it.
I keep repeating to myself that he’s gone, over and over, but the words don’
t seem real. How can they be? Ben was too big, too alive to just be gone.
Finally, something penetrates the fog that I’ve become shrouded in, and I twist out of mum’s arms to see the doctor moving to leave with the words, “I’m so very sorry. Take as long as you need.”
If I keep my eyes closed, maybe he won’t see me.
I mean, I’m small enough to be missed at this height.
At most heights actually.
I’m what most people describe as short but what I like to describe as small, becaue the word short is far too negative in my opinion. Tell me one time the word short has been used in a positive situation?
Never.
That’s when.
No good thing has ever come from the word short, so I simply refuse to use it as an adjective to describe myself.
“Imogen?”
I hear George beneath the tree I’m hiding in. I peek down and see him walking around on the grass below, his dark hair falling over his forehead, glasses framing his shockingly blue eyes. He’s determined today. He’s being all serious and official, and he knows full-well I can’t take him seriously when he does that.
George is technically only four years older than me, but those four years seem to mean everything here. He knows how to behave properly, how to guide and help. It means he’s had experience that I haven’t and therefore he is the perfect mentor.
Or so I keep being told.
“You should listen to George, Imogen. He’s a wonderful mentor. You’re very lucky to have someone like him to show you the ropes.”
I know all of these things. I also know he’s devastatingly handsome and charming and funny, and that every time I have to be alone with him to learn a new rule or way of doing something, I find myself daydreaming about what it would be like to take a walk with him to the secret garden, to hold his hand, to k—
“There you are!”
I jump, which makes me wobble precariously on the branch I’m perched on. George’s hands come around my waist and he lifts me effortlessly off the branch and drops me to my feet.