Get Out of My House
Chapter 03 - Get Out of My House
Megan's coughing worsened over the following minutes, a tight, wet sound that made Derek's blood run cold as he abandoned his mother mid-sentence and dropped to his wife's side instead.
"Call 911," he said, voice suddenly stripped of anger, replaced entirely by a fear he hadn't let himself feel until this exact second. "Now, Mom. Whatever else is happening, call them now."
Gloria, still pale, still pressed against the cabinets where his slap had sent her, fumbled for her phone with shaking hands, her earlier fury completely dissolved into something that looked, for the first time in years, like genuine terror.
Jake clung to his mother's side, small and frightened, watching his father's hands move fast and steady over his mother's shoulders, checking her breathing, her pulse, everything his years of construction site first aid training had ever taught him.
"I've got you," Derek told Megan, voice cracking despite his effort to stay calm for his son's sake. "I've got you. Help is coming."
The paramedics arrived within nine minutes, moving Megan carefully onto a stretcher, asking rapid questions Derek could barely keep up with, his mind still catching up to the specific horror of understanding his own mother had been drugging his wife inside his own home.
"Do you know what she ingested," the lead paramedic asked, and Derek looked at his mother, standing frozen near the doorway now, Jake's small hand still gripping his father's shirt.
"I don't know," Derek said, voice hollow. "I found pills on the floor. I don't know what they were, or how long this has been happening."
The paramedic bagged the scattered pills carefully, along with the bottle Gloria had left on the counter, orange plastic with a label Derek hadn't thought to check until this exact moment, his hands too full of his son and his terror to have processed anything else.
He rode with Megan in the ambulance, Jake buckled carefully into a neighbor's car to follow behind, and somewhere in the rushing, sirened dark, Derek felt the entire shape of the last several months rearranging itself in his mind.
The forgotten conversations. The mornings Megan seemed groggy for no reason. The specific, growing distance he'd chalked up to exhaustion and the strain of his frequent travel.
His own mother, managing every version of that story for him, every single time, reassuring him nothing was wrong.
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"She's stable," the paramedic said, checking Megan's vitals again. "We need to get her to the hospital quickly, but her vitals are holding."
Derek held his wife's hand the entire ride, understanding, with a specific, sickening clarity, exactly how much of the past several months he was going to need to relearn from scratch, once he finally understood the truth underneath all of it.
