Chapter 5

I wake up to the wrong ceiling. Too white, too smooth. Not my cracked bedroom plaster, not a hospital’s buzzing panels. For a second I hang in that weightless space between dreams and panic. Then my head throbs—sharp, behind my eyes—and I smell antiseptic and coffee and something that’s become horribly familiar over the last few days: Noah’s cologne, faint and clean and all wrong in this sterile place. “Hey.” His voice comes from my left, calm, lazy. “Look who decided to rejoin...