I had wished Xander Angeles absent from my life an abundance of times ever since our first meeting approximately five years prior to this present brush with death. But of all the scenarios conjured within my depraved mind; getting deported to Siberia or even arrested, all I had come to wish for in this moment was for him to push through and be well. I was forced to watch him carried in with the support of both my father and my brother, hoisting him between them both in order to keep him upright. With his feet dangling and his head hanging as he was unconscious, the sodden state of his clothing now frozen to his skin had been a clue as to what had become of him in our time apart.
“Where did you find him?” I asked Blaine in a hurried speech as my mother ran into the kitchen to prepare a wa
