Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
lace and saltwater
ROOK
The hospital processed Soren's discharge with the same efficient indifference it had shown when they'd admitted him.
Soren sat on the edge of the bed in the clothes I'd brought him from his apartment, looking more exhausted than he had yesterday. His hands were steady as he signed the final form, but I could see the tremor in his shoulders when he thought no one was watching.
I'd been standing near the door for the past twenty minutes, close enough to intervene if he needed me but far enough back to give him space.
The nurses had been kind but professional, and Soren had handled all of it with that particular brand of competence he wore when he was trying to prove he was fine.
The door opened and his siblings filed in, and I watched Soren's face transform. The careful mask cracked just enough to let relief and love bleed through, and when Talia crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him, he folded into her with a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob or both.
I stepped back toward the doorway, giving them room. This wasn't my moment. This was theirs, and they needed it without me hovering.
Micah was next, moving slower than his sister but hitting just as hard when he got there.
He didn't say anything, just pressed his forehead against Soren's shoulder and held on while his hands fisted in the back of Soren's shirt.
Poppy tried to act casual about the whole thing, slouching against the wall with her arms crossed and her face doing that teenage thing where she pretended she wasn't about to cry.
But then Soren held out an arm and she broke, crossing the room in three strides and burying her face against his chest.
The four of them stood there in a tangle of limbs and relief, and I looked away because watching felt too much like intruding on something sacred.
“I'm gonna grab some air,” I said quietly, catching Talia's eye. She nodded, understanding without me having to explain, and I slipped out into the hallway.
The hospital corridor was the same fluorescent purgatory it had been yesterday, all beige walls and antiseptic smell and the distant sound of machines keeping people alive.
I walked until I found a bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, and stared at my reflection in the mirror long enough to pull myself together.
Soren was alive. He was being discharged.
His siblings were with him, and he had a plan for aftercare, and I'd gotten him here in time.
That should have been enough to settle the panic still sitting in my chest, but my brain kept circling back to how close it had been.
How easily it could have gone the other way.
I dried my face with a paper towel and left the bathroom before I could spiral any further.
By the time I returned, Soren's siblings were saying their goodbyes.
I caught the tail end of it through the doorway — Talia reminding him about his follow-up appointment, Micah making him promise to call if he needed anything, Poppy trying to act like she wasn't worried while her eyes said otherwise.
They noticed me hovering and wrapped it up, each of them giving Soren one last hug before filing past me into the hallway.
Talia stopped long enough to say, “Take care of him,” and I nodded because there wasn't a universe where I wouldn't.
Then it was just us.
“You ready to get out of here?” I asked.
He looked at me with those hazel eyes that had seen too much and still somehow managed to find light, and said, “Fuck yes.”
I'd never brought anyone to my house before other than my parents and recently Jace and Coach. The house was my refuge, and letting Soren into it felt like handing him a piece of myself I usually kept locked down.
“I want you somewhere comfortable,” I said as we hit the highway, keeping my eyes on the road because looking at him made it harder to sound casual. “And I want to show you my life. The parts that aren't just hockey and bullshit.”
Soren turned his head to look at me, and smiled and took my hand that was sitting on my knee and held it and that was enough.
The drive took forty minutes, and we spent most of it in comfortable silence.
He had his window cracked, letting the salt air pour in, and I watched him from the corner of my eye as the tension slowly bled out of his shoulders.
By the time we pulled into the driveway, he looked more like himself than he had since I'd found him on that bathroom floor.
I grabbed his bag from the trunk and led him up the front steps. The door unlocked with a quiet click, and I held it open as he walked inside.
He stopped three feet past the threshold, and I watched his face as he took it in.
The open floor plan, the furniture I'd chosen because it looked comfortable instead of expensive, the floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the ocean like a living painting.
Gray water stretched out to the horizon, and the afternoon light poured through the glass in a way that made the whole space feel bigger than it was.
“Damn,” Soren breathed, and there was awe in his voice that made something in my chest loosen.
“Yeah.” I set his bag down. “It's quiet. Private stretch of coast — Jace is next door but you'd never know it. Just the water and the birds and whatever the fuck else lives out here.”
He turned his head slightly, and I could see the profile of his face caught in the light.
The exhaustion was still there, written in the shadows under his eyes and the way he held himself like he was bracing for the next hit.
But underneath that was relief, and maybe the beginning of permission to stop fighting for just a little while.
“Come on,” I said. “Let me show you the rest of it.”
The first day, I mostly just kept him fed and warm and didn't make a production out of either.
He slept until almost eleven, and I let him.
I'd been up since seven doing the things that needed doing — grocery run, washing the spare set of sheets I'd put on the bed, making sure the heating was set right because the coast got cold in the evenings and the last thing he needed was to wake up shivering.
When he finally appeared in the kitchen doorway in yesterday's sweats with his hair going six directions, I had eggs going on the stovetop and didn't comment on any of it.
“Morning,” I said.
“What time is it?”
“Doesn't matter. Sit down.”
He pulled out a stool at the counter and sat, and I slid a coffee across to him without being asked. He wrapped both hands around the mug and drank half of it in silence while I finished the eggs, and then I put a plate down in front of him and sat across from him with my own.
He looked at the eggs. Then at me. “You cooked.”
“That's what happens when there's a kitchen. I've seen your fridge at your apartment. There's never any food in it. Go ahead and eat.”
He ate, and didn't make a thing of it, which was the right call.
I wasn't going to tell him I'd stood in the grocery store for twenty minutes trying to remember what I'd seen in his fridge the few times I'd been to his apartment, what he actually liked versus what he bought because it was cheap.
I'd probably gotten half of it wrong. He ate everything on the plate without complaint.
After breakfast he sat on the couch with his coffee and I sat in the armchair across from him, and we didn't fill the silence with anything.
The ocean moved outside the windows. He'd found one of the books from the shelf beside the fireplace at some point, an old thriller with a cracked spine, and he read about four pages and then set it down and just looked at the water instead.
“You're staring at me,” he said, without turning around.
“I'm looking at the ocean.”
“I'm between you and the ocean.”
“Coincidence.”
He turned his head and looked at me with the dry, tired version of that expression I'd learned to read as fond. “You can relax, Rook. I'm not going to do anything.”
“I know that.”
“You look like you're expecting me to spontaneously combust.”
“I don't look like that.”
“You're sitting on the absolute front edge of that chair.” He raised an eyebrow. “You've been up since before I woke up and you've barely sat down. I can see you calculating whether I've eaten enough and slept enough and breathed enough and it's very sweet but also a little bit intense.”
I leaned back in the chair. Made myself take up the full seat instead of perching like I was ready to move at half a second's notice.
“Better?” I asked.
“Marginally.” He turned back to the window. After a pause: “Thank you. For all of it. Not just today.”
I didn't say anything, because I didn't have words that were big enough and small enough at the same time, so I just sat there and let him have the acknowledgement and hoped he could feel the weight of what I meant behind it.
By the second evening we'd found a rhythm.
He slept a lot, which I'd expected. Not the collapsed, unconscious sleep of the hospital, but long stretches of genuine rest in the late morning and again for an hour or two in the afternoon, and I worked around them without comment. When he was awake we talked, or didn't, and both felt easy.
He asked me things I hadn't been asked in a long time.
Not about hockey, not about the playoffs or the team or anything that lived in my public life.
He asked me what I listened to when I was on the ice at dawn before anyone else got there, what I'd wanted to be before hockey made the decision for me, what the worst injury I'd had was and whether I'd been scared.
He asked about my parents in the way he always had, with genuine warmth and a kind of wistful affection that told me he'd liked them and still remembered liking them.