Chapter 2: Eight Months of Silence
My lunch bag slipped from my fingers and hit the floor.
"Arnold." My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"What is going on?"
He pulled me gently by the elbow, away from the nurses' station, away from Brenda's wide, frightened eyes.
We stopped beside a supply room door.
He couldn't look at me directly.
"Ben made us promise not to say anything," he said.
"He wanted to protect you."
"Protect me from what?" My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.
Arnold pressed his lips together.
His jaw worked like he was searching for the right words and couldn't find a single one.
"How long has he been sick, Arnold?"
The word came out of me before I even knew I was thinking it.
And the way Arnold's face crumbled told me everything I needed to know.
"Eight months," he whispered.
Eight months.
While Ben was texting me "don't wait up." While I was wrapping his dinner in foil.
While I was lying awake wondering why he wouldn't let me in — he had been fighting something alone in the dark, inside the very hospital where he saved everyone else's children.
"He didn't want Lily to know," Arnold said, his voice breaking.
"He didn't want you to look at him differently."
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Then Arnold's pager went off.
He looked down at it — and went completely still.
