Page 18 of Forbidden Cowboy

I looked at my brother’s face, and I wished, so desperately, that he would open his eyes and give me one of his warm hugs. The kind he’d given when I broke my leg hurdling in high school and the same one he’d given me when our parents died only months apart. He would know what to do; Beau always knew what to do.

They had removed the tape from his eyes while trying to reverse the coma so his eyes could open of their own volition, and now he looked like he was just sleeping, like he really could wake up at any moment.

“Miss Carter?” A voice came from the door with a polite knock.

I turned in my seat to see one of the doctors I had met since Beau’s admission—young-ish, with sandy hair and a stiff smile. I couldn’t remember his name.

“Yes, hello,” I said, standing, and holding out my hand for him to shake.

After shaking hands, he stood at the end of Beau’s bed, eyes trained on my brother’s face like he was examining him, before flicking back to me.

“I wanted to update you on what’s been happening.”

“Okay…”

“We’ve been monitoring Beau over the last two days, since withdrawing the medication that’s kept him sedated. While we’ve seen improvements in his brain activity, and some of his vitals have also improved, as you can see, he’s not yet awake.”

“And he should be?”

“Ideally, at this point, yes.”

“So, what can we do?” I asked, a cold sweat slicking my palms.

“All there is to do currently is wait. We will continue to monitor him and keep you updated. It’s not unheard of for it to take some people up to a week to wake up, but he may have slipped into a coma of his own volition.”

I felt my heart plummet. We’d all heard the stories of the person in a coma for years, waking up and finding their life had passed without them. What was I going to do if that was Beau? Was I going to spend every day by his side, wasting my own life willing him to wake up?

“He’s only twenty-five,” I whispered with tears in my eyes.

“Which means he’s young and strong—he’s got a fighting chance,” the doctor said in a calm voice.

“I—what—what happens if he never wakes up?”

“As of right now, that’s not something we’re concerned about,” he said. “So, you shouldn’t be, either.”

“Then what are you concerned about?” I asked, fearful of his answer.

The man sighed and shifted his eyes away to my brother and back again.

“Our biggest concern isn’t about him waking up, it’s about what happens when he does. We won’t know the full extent of any brain damage until we can assess his mental faculties.”

I took in a sharp breath.

“Oh.”

“Do you have any questions for me?”

Only about a million, I thought.

“No, no,” I said quietly.

“I’ll be leaving, then,” he said, and paused at the door. “Please don’t hesitate to have the nurses page me if you have any concerns.”

Of course, I had concerns, how could I not? He had just told me that not only was my brother not waking up like they had hoped and expected, but that he could have suffered an unknown amount of brain damage.

I felt ridiculously selfish at that moment. My brother was the one who was suffering, and yet all I could think about was how difficult all of this had made my life. I couldn’t get a job, and I couldn’t stay by his side. And what if he woke up, and I needed to care for him? Could I leave everything I had in Denver (which, granted, after my firing wasn’t much), and move back to look after him?

I looked at the man lying on the bed, and guilt rippled through me like a diseased wave. If… when he woke up, his life would never be the same, and he had so much left of it to live. How could I be thinking of myself when everything that either of us had known could be taken from him? Would my bright, computer-nerd of a brother still be in there? The one who had decided he was going to learn to code at fourteen and managed it, in between working relief milking shifts for local farms, and helping out at Wyatt’s ranch on weekends. The one who had accidentally broken my pinky finger when he pushed me off a hay bale, and spent the next six weeks trying to make up for it by teaching me how to ride a bike. Would the boy who flew to Denver in the middle of the night just to fly me back for our father’s funeral still be there?