Our Destiny

6. And then a hurricane hit

Once she got in, she sent a message to Katie asking her to take her backpack. She tucked her phone into her pocket, ignoring the messages and calls coming from her friend. She stared blankly at the passing scenery out the window. And at that moment, she understood one very important thing. That's why she asked them to come tomorrow. She knew.

After over ten minutes, the car stopped in front of a two-story building, where a group of children with a caregiver was just entering. The young Walker quickly got out of the taxi and headed inside to find her younger brother. The brunette entered a room decorated with various posters, pictures, and drawings on the walls. Although there were really a lot of them, everything looked surprisingly decent. At one point, her attention was drawn to her brother's work, which he signed in the lower right corner of the sheet. The drawing, as its title indicated, depicted a family. However, something else caught the girl's eye. There were three people on the sheet, not five. She examined each one separately, noticing the likeness of Will in the center, holding her and George's hands. He even drew Dino, who lay next to his feet, but she didn't see their parents anywhere. She was sure they weren't on the drawing because she and Geo differed from them in many ways. She guessed that the teacher, seeing his work, was convinced that it depicted him with his parents, not with his sister and brother. And he simply didn't draw them. Because for him, apparently, the definition of family was only them.

The girl finally tore her gaze away from the picture, looking at the woman sitting at the desk, who was observing her closely. She had gray hair, tied in a tight bun at the bottom, blue eyes looking much larger in rectangular glasses, and a cheerful face with a few distinct wrinkles. She was dressed in a cream shirt with a dark green brooch pinned on the left side and a leather skirt reaching below her knees with a slight slit on the side. She looked really impeccable and relatively friendly for a math teacher. Alexa immediately explained to the woman the reason for interrupting the lesson. She said she came to pick up Will from class, who, as soon as he heard about it, started packing with a smile on his face. He didn't know yet that the reason for all this was nothing pleasant. They both headed to the taxi, which was still waiting for them outside the school. And that's when it all started.

The race against time.

The girl didn't say a word to the boy about why she had really come for him. She had no idea how to explain it to him, so she sat quietly lost in her thoughts, listening to her brother's stories as if through a fog. She didn't want, or rather didn't know how, to tell the ten-year-old boy that soon a person so close to him would be gone forever. She didn't even intend to try to put it into words because she knew perfectly well that she wouldn't be able to. She kept wondering if it was a good idea to take him there, but she knew that if she didn't do it, the boy might resent her for the rest of his life for not saying goodbye. She intended to give him a choice and not force him into anything. On the other hand, she hoped he would want to step into the room even for a moment because for her, there was nothing worse than dying alone. Because even though death is often cruel and painful, the most brutal is the one where there's no one to hold your hand and say they'll be there till the end. The one where the last words you hear are "I love you." Yes... that's the darkest vision of death.

The brunette was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn't even realize the car had just stopped. She snapped out of it only when she heard her younger brother's question.

"Why did we come to the hospital?" she couldn't utter a single word. With Will, she always tried to be understanding and warm, which was often difficult for her. That's why she let the question pass her ears, not wanting to say something he would regret later. She wasn't fit for such conversations, so she simply paid the driver, took the boy's hand, and walked into the hospital with him.