Worth Dying For by Luxie Ryder

that’s what he’s telling anybody who will listen. Beats me why he didn’t just stay with you and use his phone if you both survived. The Coast Guard picked him up, rowing in the wrong direction in the dark.”
    “I don’t remember…” Amber felt the phone slipping from her grasp as the need to sleep overwhelmed her again. She could hear Richard’s voice coming from a long way off and she answered his frantic shouts but couldn’t be sure he heard her. Gradually, another sound drowned him out—a loud mechanical whirring. A strong wind accompanied the noise and she put her hands over her face to protect it from the sand being blown into her nose, mouth and eyes.
    She heard voices approaching and then a cold, firm pressure on her forehead that she shrunk back from. Amber moaned at a sudden pain at her temple and tried to push whatever had caused it away.
    “We’ve got you, Ms. Kirkwood,” someone said.
    A sharp, unpleasant sensation in her arm pissed her off and she tried to tell them to leave her alone and stop sticking things into her, but then a nice, warm feeling of peace settled over her and she didn’t care what they were doing as long as they let her go back to sleep.
     
    * * * *
     
    Amber groaned in protest when she woke again to bright morning sunshine that intensified the throbbing ache in her head. The pain medication had worn off—and that sucked—but at least she knew where she was. She’d woken many times in the night and had been afraid to find herself in a stark, white room she had no memory of. Eventually a nurse told her that she had been taken to a small coastal hospital in Maine, arriving sometime before dawn. A vague memory of a helicopter ride nagged at the edges of her mind but she remembered every bit of having her wound sewn up. Jesus Christ, that had hurt. They claimed she only had six stitches but Amber swore they used a fishing hook to do them.
    As the only patient in the small, four bed ward they’d put her in, she’d had nothing to do but sleep, pee or stare at the ceiling all night. The morning brought with it hopes of freedom—she longed to get back to her own home and wash the caked blood out of her hair—but last night they’d said she had to stay a few hours longer “for observation”.
    The door to the small room swung open and Amber turned to see David walk through it, carrying a huge bunch of flowers. Swallowing down a groan at the sight of him, she forced a tight smile onto her face. Richard had called again earlier and she understood why he had seemed so angry before. David had run off and left her and, no matter how hard she tried to remember what had happened, Amber just couldn’t imagine any scenario that would involve him leaving her to fend for herself. In fact, the only reason she didn’t kick his ass straight back out the door was that she needed him to fill in the gaps in her memory.
      “There’s my girl.” David said, as if he’d done no more than lose her in a busy mall less than five minutes earlier. “How you doing, baby?”
    “Not as well as you.” Amber didn’t try to keep the acid out of her tone.
    If he noticed the barbed comment, he didn’t let on. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you.”
    “Why? Because you wouldn’t want people to know that you ran off and left me to die?”
    David’s smiled slipped. “I went for help.”
    “Why didn’t you take me with you?”
    He spread his hands in an open gesture that she instantly distrusted. “You were hurt. And…and I couldn’t be sure I would make it. I would never put you in that much danger.”
    “And leaving me alone with a concussion seemed like a good idea to you? What if I’d started to convulse or swallowed my tongue?”
    “Look, I didn’t know how badly hurt you were.” David reached for her. “The important thing is, we are both okay now.”
    Amber shrugged him off. “Why leave the island? You could have called for help from there.”
    “I was in fear