Chapter 43 #3
It was tucked near a secured unit where visitors had to be buzzed in, away from the main ICU waiting area and the elevators where anyone with a phone could pretend they were just passing through.
It should have felt better.
It didn’t.
Nothing felt better without Cade.
Hours passed, though I had no idea how many because time had stopped moving in anything as useful as minutes.
It stretched and snapped around every update, around every door that opened, around every nurse who walked past without looking at us, around every time someone’s phone lit up and everyone in the room flinched like the screen might know something we didn’t.
Four hours.
Six.
Maybe eight.
Long enough for my body to ache from sitting and my eyes to burn from crying and my hand to go numb inside my dad’s because neither of us knew how to let go.
The updates came in pieces that were not really updates at all, just medical fragments we were supposed to somehow survive.
They had repaired damage in his abdomen.
They had controlled the bleeding. They had given him blood.
His lung had collapsed, but the chest tube was working.
He was on a ventilator. They were keeping him sedated so his body could rest, which sounded almost gentle until the words swelling, infection, and complications kept following behind it.
Every time one of those words entered the room, my dad’s hand tightened around mine. Like he could hold me together through pressure alone if he squeezed hard enough. As if Cade would keep breathing somewhere beyond the doors none of us were allowed through.
At some point, Aura fell asleep with her head on Easton’s shoulder and woke up crying thirty minutes later.
Briggs sat on the floor with his back against the wall, staring at his hands like he could still see Ryan’s blood on them even though he hadn’t been the one covered in it.
Charm paced until Rider physically placed her into a chair and told her if she passed out, he would move to the floor, and she passed out with her head in his lap instead.
Coach Little sat with his phone in his hand as he relayed everything we knew so far to the Detroit Red Wings staff.
Coach Little had been planning to talk to Cade after the game and tell him they wanted him. Now his future, not just his life, was hanging in the balance.
Ryan came back after someone found him clothes. Maybe some teammate who understood that Cade’s blood on him had become its own kind of wound.
He stood near the doorway of the new room in a clean KFU sweatshirt and hospital scrub pants, hair damp like he had scrubbed himself raw. His eyes found mine immediately.
“I stayed with him,” he said.
I stood and crossed the room before anyone could stop me.
Then I hugged him.
Ryan froze for one second. Then his arms came around me so carefully it hurt worse than if he had crushed me.
“He just wanted to know you were safe,” he whispered.
My face crumpled against his chest.
“Over and over,” Ryan said, voice breaking. “I kept telling him you were safe.”
I nodded because speaking would kill me.
“He believed me,” Ryan said. “I think.”
He sounded like he needed that to be true.
So, I pulled back and looked at him through tears. “He did.”
Ryan’s eyes went red, and then Knox was there, touching his shoulder, guiding him toward a chair, and for once, Ryan let someone else move him.
The surgeon finally came out sometime after the world had gone early-morning pink through the windows.
Everyone stood at once.
My body moved before my mind did, but Dad’s hand found my back, steadying me.
The surgeon looked tired in that terrifying way surgeons looked tired when they had been inside someone’s body for hours and were about to tell a room full of people whether they had won or lost.
“Cade Mercer’s family?”
Harrison and Elenore stepped forward together. “We are,” Harrison said.
The surgeon nodded. “I’d like to speak with you privately.”
My stomach dropped. Private meant bad. Private meant whatever came next was too awful to say in front of everyone who loved him.
But Harrison turned his head and looked directly at me, then at my dad. “We’re going to have his girlfriend come with us,” he said.
The surgeon hesitated, but Harrison did not.
Elenore reached for my hand. Dad stepped closer, his voice quiet but steady. “And her father, if that’s all right.”
For one strange second, it felt like the whole hospital paused to see if anyone was going to tell Harrison Mercer no.
No one did.
The surgeon nodded. “Of course.”
We followed him into the small consultation room. Harrison, Elenore, Dad, and me.
I sat because Elenore gently pushed me into a chair like she understood my legs were only pretending, and then the surgeon closed the door.
“Cade is alive.”
He said that first.
Thank goodness, he said that first.
“He survived the surgery,” he told us, and the sound that left Elenore did not belong to any cold mother Cade had ever described. It belonged to a woman whose body had been waiting for permission to keep living.
My hand flew to my mouth as Dad’s palm landed warm and heavy between my shoulder blades.
The surgeon took a breath before continuing, his eyes moving from Harrison and Elenore to my dad and then, finally, to me.
“Cade’s injuries were severe,” he said carefully. “One wound punctured his lung, collapsing it and causing significant bleeding into the chest cavity. We placed a chest tube to help drain the blood and air, and his lung is responding, but he still needs ventilator support while it stabilizes.”
Elenore’s hand tightened around mine.
The surgeon’s voice stayed gentle, but nothing about the words felt gentle.
“The abdominal wound caused internal bleeding and damage to part of his lower intestine. We repaired the injury, controlled the bleeding, cleaned the area thoroughly, and closed what we could tonight. He also received blood during surgery.”
My stomach turned so hard I thought I might be sick.
Harrison’s voice came out rough. “But he’s alive?”
“He’s alive,” the surgeon confirmed. “He is in critical condition, but he is stable right now. The next forty-eight hours are highly critical.”
Critical but stable.
I grabbed onto those words with both hands. Those words became the first fragile thing I could hold.
Critical but stable.
“He is on a ventilator,” the surgeon continued.
“We’re keeping him deeply sedated for now.
His body has been through substantial trauma, and we need to reduce stress on his lungs and abdomen while we monitor swelling, bleeding, infection, and how his lung responds over the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. ”
“Sedated,” I whispered.
The surgeon looked at me kindly. “A medically induced coma, essentially. It allows the machines to help him breathe while his body begins recovering. It does not mean he won’t wake up.”
Won’t wake up.
My body rejected the phrase even with the does not in front of it.
“When?” Harrison asked, voice strained but steady.
“If he remains stable, we’ll reassess in a couple of days and start reducing sedation gradually. But with injuries like this, we take it hour by hour.”
Hour by hour.
I hated time.
I hated every version of it.
Harrison asked questions I couldn’t follow. Elenore cried silently beside me, her hand locked around mine. Dad listened like he was memorizing every word in case I needed him to explain it later when my brain worked again.
When we stepped back into the private waiting room, every face turned toward us.
For a second, no one spoke until Harrison did.
“He’s alive.”
The room broke. Not loudly. Not all at once. But like every person there had been holding their body too tightly and finally loosened one muscle.
Briggs covered his face with both hands, his shoulders folding inward like the words had finally found the softest part of him.
Easton bent forward with his palms braced on his knees, head down, breathing hard through whatever fear he refused to let turn into sound.
Rider turned away, one hand dragging over the back of his neck, while Ryan closed his eyes like hearing Cade was alive had nearly taken him down instead of holding him up.
Aura let out one broken sob beside me.
Then Charm grabbed me so hard I almost fell, and my dad’s arm came around both of us immediately, anchoring us against him while the whole room tried to remember how to breathe around the one word we had been waiting for.
Alive.
“He’s critical,” Harrison continued, voice rougher now. “But stable. They’re keeping him sedated for a few days. He’s on a ventilator. The next couple of days matter.”
No one cheered. No one acted like it was over, because it wasn’t.
Cade was alive, but not safe.
I pressed both hands to my mouth as tears spilled over again.
Hope did not feel gentle right now. It felt like something with teeth. It hurt almost as much as fear because now I had something to lose all over again.
Elenore crossed the room and wrapped one arm around me while my dad held the other side, and for a moment, I stood between Cade’s mother and my own mother’s memory, between the family I was born into and the one Cade had accidentally dragged me toward with blood and love and the worst night of our lives.
“He’s alive,” I whispered.
Aura nodded through tears. “He’s alive.”
And until someone told me otherwise, that was the only prayer I had left.