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“It means Ash isn’t with her.”

“I see,” he said as he put the pieces together. “Did Ellie see him before she went?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I never called her. I just assumed he was there.”

“Maybe he is,” Mick reasoned. “Just because Ellie isn’t doesn’t mean he’s not crashing at her place.”

I tossed the paperwork onto the dashboard with a heavy sigh. “Angela said her place is empty.”

Mick was silent as we buckled up and got ready to head out, but as he gunned the engine he turned back to me with a speculative look on his face. “That doesn’t mean it is. You’ve said it yourself; he’s like a ghost sometimes. She just might not have seen him. Why don’t you just go and look?”

“Now?”

Mick nodded. “Why not? She lives a few blocks from you, right? We can be there in twenty minutes.”

“What if we get called out?”

“Quit stalling. We’re taking a lunch break.”

It was pointless to protest. I’d known him long enough to know he’d dump me at the side of the road and go without me. We pulled up outside Ellie’s swanky apartment block a short while later.

I left Mick in the bus and took the stairs. It was Ash who had the fear of elevators, not me, but even when he wasn’t around, it was a hard habit to break. I banged on Ellie’s door, once, twice, three times. The sound echoed in the deserted hallway, and in my head. I banged one more time, but my heart already knew he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there. Fuck. If he wasn’t with Ellie, where the hell was he? He didn’t have anyone else… anywhere else where he felt safe. The only safe place he truly knew was home, and I’d made it clear I didn’t want him there.

I slid down the wall and put my head in my hands. A deep-rooted fear began to claw at my chest, a fear I’d denied for far too long. Something was wrong, really fucking wrong, and I was too late to do anything about it.

A
FEW
days later, I woke up with a jump. I looked around. I was on the couch, fully dressed, boots and all.

Damn. Not again.

I shrugged out of my jacket and kicked off my shoes. It was early, the buttcrack of dawn, but I hadn’t been home for long. After coming off shift, I’d spent a few hours roaming the city. When I finally made it home, I cut my losses and went straight to the couch. Exhaustion had taken me before I could brood too much, but I hadn’t slept for long before something disturbed me. I felt pretty dopey as I glanced around for the culprit, and finding nothing, I clicked the TV on and lay back down.

The TV droned in the background as I stared at the ceiling and mentally replayed the past few days. Ash wasn’t at Ellie’s place. I knew it even as I raised my hand to knock. Mick kept telling me he just wasn’t home, or answering the door, but his reasoning was futile. Ash wasn’t there.

I closed my eyes and exhaled slowly. Every time I thought about it, my heart beat too fast. I’d never been an anxious person—sulking was my baseline when shit went bad—but knowing Ash was out there on his own somewhere fucking broke me. It was probably the worst moment of clarity I’d ever had. Ellie was the only person he truly trusted. If he hadn’t gone to her, I knew with a sickening certainty that he hadn’t gone to anyone at all. In the early days of our relationship, I lost count of the number of times I looked at him and silently vowed he’d never be on his own again. The sense of failure was almost as bad as the crippling worry.

Almost.

Over and over, I kicked myself for assuming he’d gone to Ellie’s, for not calling her and touching base. Stupidly, I’d taken her silence as a message to stay away. I hadn’t even checked if Ash had been going to work, or registered that all his tattoo shit lay untouched in his room. A quick phone call to the shop had confirmed my fears: he wasn’t there either. With Ellie’s phone going straight to voice mail, I was out of options.

Reality hit me like a wrecking ball, and I felt sick when it finally dawned on me that Ash wasn’t just gone, he was
missing,
and that was enough to pull my head out of my ass. I had to find him. Even if he didn’t want to come home, I had to know he was okay.

First, though, I had to figure out where to look. If he’d hit the streets, there was no way he’d gravitate to the places the rest of the city’s waifs and strays congregated. I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did, but I knew one thing for sure: if he was as fucked up as I truly feared he was, he’d have found himself the deepest, darkest hole he could find and buried himself in it. In a city as large as Chicago… damn. I was at my wit’s end, and I didn’t have a clue where to start.

Despite the turmoil raging in my head, I fell asleep again at some point, and it was dark by the time my cell phone roused me. Dazed, I stumbled from the couch and followed the noise into the bathroom, where I’d left it on the counter. The call rang out as I retrieved the phone. I flipped it open. The screen flashed with a bunch of calls I’d apparently slept through. They were all from the same number: an Illinois area code I didn’t recognize. I pressed the redial button, frowning, and waited for the call to connect.

It seemed like a lifetime before a nasal voice rattled off the name of an ER I’d never heard of. Puzzled, I gave my name and waited again while she put me on hold. I brushed my teeth and pulled a clean shirt over my head. I was halfway through changing my pants when a vaguely familiar voice came on the line. Though she seemed to know who I was, it took me a moment to place her as an agency nurse I’d known since the very start of my paramedic career. “Jane?”

“The very same,” she said. “You’re a pain the ass to get hold of. I’ve been calling you all day.”

“Um, sorry?” I said, confused as hell. I’d known her a long time, but we were hardly friends. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a reason for her to call me, especially from an ER in the ass end of nowhere. “Can I do something for you?”

“I hope so. Your roommate was admitted here early this morning. An EMS crew found him at the L station a few blocks from here.”

I froze. Every muscle in my body turned to stone. “What? Are you sure it’s him?”

“As sure as I can be. He didn’t have any ID, but I recognized him from when you brought him to St. Mark’s last year. He doesn’t look so good, Pete. What’s he been doing to himself?”

I closed my eyes against the unwelcome image of Ash strung out on a hospital bed. They wouldn’t have admitted him unless he was in a really bad way. “What’s he on?”

Jane spouted a standard list of IV fluids, but I cut her off before she could finish. “No, what did he OD on?”

The brief beat of silence before Jane spoke again seemed to go on forever. “I don’t understand. Pete, his toxicology results were negative. Clean as a whistle. He’s hypothermic and he has pneumonia.”

Clean. Pneumonia. Clean. Pneumonia.

The two words echoed over and over in my head as I struggled to absorb the information Jane rattled off. I yanked the sweatpants the rest of the way up my legs and hurried to the kitchen to scrawl down the name of the hospital she gave me. I punched the location into my laptop and my heart sank. The hospital really was about as far south of the city as it was possible to go: far enough for Ash to be gone by the time I got there. “Does he know you called me?”

“He’s not awake yet,” Jane said. “Am I missing something?”

I stamped my feet into my sneakers, stalling. I didn’t quite know how to explain the depths my relationship with Ash had sunk to. “He just… might not want to see anyone.”

There was a brief pause. I could almost see Jane sizing me up through the phone. She was a wily woman, and when she spoke again, I knew she understood.

“Okay,”
she said briskly.
“If he comes round, I’ll have the other nurses distract him until you get here. Probably best he doesn’t see me either, huh?”

She hung up before I could thank her.

I shoved my phone in my pocket, left the apartment, and ran for the subway. The streets were a blur as I flew through them, but after I’d thrown myself onto a train, I found myself at an abrupt standstill. The train was relatively empty, but there was nothing I could do to make it go any faster. Too agitated to sit, I leaned up against the wall and drummed my fingers on the plastic paneling. The very real fear of being too late haunted me. Jane was right: Ash would remember her, and he’d know she’d call me. If he didn’t want to see me, he’d bolt and I’d have little chance of finding him again.

The thought terrified me, choking me and making it hard to breathe. I banged my head on the wall. Ash needed me, so I had to be strong. I took a deep breath and let my mind wander back to the day I’d brought him to Jane to fix up his hand. I’d never figured out if the burned gash on his palm was an accident—and we’d
never
talked about it—but it was one of the earliest clues I had that something wasn’t quite right.

Perversely, though, it was also the day I realized he touched a part of me no one else could reach. Beneath his wary, suspicious eyes, he’d been so vulnerable, like he didn’t understand himself any better than I did. I watched him blanch at the sight of the mangled, burned skin on his palm, and all I’d wanted was to take him in my arms and make it all go away. I’d never felt that for anyone. It had shaken me to the bone, but the feeling had never left me. Mick was right: Ash was everything to me, and the train rattled to a stop just as my brain reached the conclusion my heart already knew. No matter how bad things were between us, I wasn’t leaving that hospital without him.

I
FOUND
Jane waiting for me when I pushed through the entrance of the shittiest ER I’d ever seen. It fit with the dilapidated state of the rest of the hospital, which, bizarrely, I’d never heard of. It was just the kind of shithole Jane liked to work in, but the thought of Ash being a patient in the run-down, underequipped ER scared the crap out of me.

How the hell did he end up here?

Jane led me through the triage area and opened the door to a side room. I followed her inside, but the room was empty. “Where is he?”

“Down the hall in one of the curtained beds.” Jane shut the door and leaned back against it. “I’ll take you to him in a minute. I want to talk to you first.”

“Did he wake up?”

“Yes, not long ago. One of the doctors is with him now.”

Jane looked at me for a long moment.

I stared back at her, and my patience began to wear thin. “What’s going on?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” she said. “We don’t have any records here for Ash, and I don’t remember any from St. Mark’s. Is he bipolar?”

“What? Why would you think that?”

Jane shrugged. “I only saw him conscious briefly, but something’s not right. I remember him being skittish last time. I thought perhaps he was having an episode.”

I closed my eyes briefly and shook my head. Something was wrong with Ash, something serious, but it wasn’t that. I
knew
it wasn’t that, damn it.

Jane’s hand on my arm startled me. I opened my eyes and she smiled kindly. “The doctor’s already seen what I’ve seen. She wants to call a social worker and a psychiatrist. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong. Come on, Pete, you thought he’d OD’d on the phone. Is he an addict?”

I shrugged helplessly, and all the fight left me in a big whoosh of air. “I don’t know. He hasn’t been home for a while.”

Jane rubbed my arm gently. “He doesn’t look like he’s been using anything. If you hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t have even thought of it.”

Her words were meant as comfort, but they washed over me like she hadn’t even spoken. So what if he hadn’t been using? He was still sick, still so messed up they thought he needed psychiatric help.

Fuck, fuck,
fuck
. Why hadn’t I just picked up the damn phone?

“How bad is the pneumonia?”

Jane made an uneasy face. “He was dehydrated and cold when they brought him in, and wheezing pretty badly. We got some fluids into him and warmed him up, but he’s got some nasty cuts and bruises. They did a chest X-ray while he was out of it. The doctor was reviewing it when I came to find you. Nothing looks broken, but there’s some heavy scarring on his lungs. Has he had pneumonia before?”

I could only shrug and shake my head. I had no idea if Ash had been so sick before. He’d been on his own and misused his body for so long that any number of injuries and illnesses could have gone untreated. Impossibly, the painful band around my heart tightened just a little bit more. “Can I see him?”

Jane blinked, and the pondering look on her face cleared. “Of course, I’ll take you now.”

We approached Ash’s bed just as a doctor emerged from behind the curtain. She breezed past us without a second glance, and Jane broke away from me to follow her. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll find out what’s going on, okay?”

I nodded, and she walked away. I stepped around the corner, drew back the curtain, and found myself faced with an empty bed. Panic surged through me. For a split second, I honestly thought I was too late, until movement caught my eye and I finally saw him, hunched over the side of the bed.

“Ash?”

It felt strange to say his name aloud. I needed more than anything for him to look at me, anything just to know he was real, but it took far too long for him to respond, and when he finally met my eyes, my heart dropped through the floor. I barely recognized the face that stared back at me, and for an unending, torturous moment, I saw no recognition in his hooded, bloodshot gaze either. His eyes were completely blank, like he couldn’t even see me.

I took in the sight of him and felt what little composure I had left evaporated. He was dirty and disheveled, stooped over with his hand on his chest and clearly in pain. There was a layer of stubbly scruff covering his face, and the hand on his chest was grubby, bruised, and littered with tiny cuts and scrapes. I rounded the bed in two strides and reached out for his other hand. I found it at his side, supporting his weight against the bed, and in much the same condition as the first.