2
Lila
We finally had enough control to send him upstairs.
My arms were heavy, my lower back ached, and my gloves felt fused to my skin.
Someone was still talking. Someone always was.
The edges of the sound had gone strange for me, dulled in places and painfully sharp in others.
I heard the wheels turn beneath the bed, the wet pull of suction, and Blue breathing harder than usual beside me.
The body knows when it has come too close to losing something before the mind catches up.
They wheeled Jackson out, and the emptiness he left behind in the trauma bay felt wrong.
I stood with my hands hanging at my sides for a beat too long, staring at the doors after they swung closed, then forced myself toward the sink.
My gloves were soaked through, the room was still moving around me, and if I stopped moving with it, I was going to come apart in front of everyone.
I stripped the gloves off and turned on the water. It hit hot, sending pink ribbons swirling down the drain. My hands shook once, hard enough that I flattened them against the edge of the sink until they settled.
Through the glass, I saw Blue standing with a man in a blood-spattered cut.
He hovered too close to the trauma bay doors, broad shoulders tight and his whole body strung with the kind of fear that made some men dangerous.
Blue looked at him and went still for half a second.
That was all I had time to notice before they wheeled Jackson toward surgery, and the room pulled me after him.
The hallway felt colder than the trauma bay.
Maybe it always did, or maybe I only noticed because the sweat beneath my scrub top had cooled and every nerve in my body remained too close to the surface.
Blue was still talking to the man when I caught up, her voice level while his came rough and frayed with genuine fear rather than anger.
“Go with him,” he said, quiet enough that I might have missed it from another few feet away. His jaw tightened before the next word left him. “Please.”
That plea struck something inside me, not because it was meant for me or because it made him seem softer, but because I understood what it cost certain men to say that word aloud, especially with other people watching.
Blue studied him for a long second, then nodded and turned toward surgery without another word.
Blue was already in the operating room when I slipped inside. The surgeon looked up, saw me, and groaned as though my presence was a personal insult. “And you,” he said, gesturing with one gloved hand. “What are you doing here?”
“I know him, and I need to know he’ll be okay.”
He muttered something about too many staff members knowing unsavory people before turning back to the table, leaving me to decide later whether I should be offended.
Blue shifted enough to make room for me against the wall, and we stood scrubbed and silent while controlled chaos unfolded beneath the lights.
We watched the same man with our breath held, each of us carrying a different reason.
Distance should have made it easier. It didn’t.
The operating room moved with a different pulse than trauma.
The sharp rush had given way to measured violence, trained hands opening and repairing, clamping and forcing order back into a body that had taken too much damage.
Overhead lights stripped the room bare. Stainless steel flashed while the monitors maintained their steady electronic conversation, and everything around me should have felt familiar.
Instead, it felt unreal.
Jackson lay beneath those lights with tubes running into him, blood still refusing to stop completely, and a chest that rose only because machines, medicine, and sheer stubbornness had conspired to keep him from slipping away.
After a while, Blue shifted close enough that her shoulder brushed mine. “Okay,” she murmured. “Tell me now.”
I cut my eyes toward her. There was no point pretending I didn’t know what she meant.
“How do you know Deacon?” She stressed the name, then glanced toward the table. “Jackson. Whatever we’re calling him.”
For a moment, I said nothing. The truth sat against the back of my teeth, heavy and hot and seventeen years too old. Then I looked at her and gave her the one piece I couldn’t imagine delivering gently.
“He’s Jade’s father.”
Her head turned so fast I felt the movement beside me. The shock on her face might have been funny on another day, mostly because Blue rarely let anything catch her off guard and I had managed it while a surgeon worked on my past ten feet away. Her hand went instinctively to her stomach. “Oh.”
“Yeah.” She looked at Jackson, then back at me, but whatever question had formed died when I angled my head. “Okay. Your turn.”
Her mouth twisted as her palm moved over her belly. “Baby daddy’s VP.”
I stared at her. Despite the room, the smell of cautery and blood, and the fact that nothing about the night was remotely amusing, an incredulous breath escaped me. “Of course he is.”
The smallest smile crossed her face, quick and grim, before disappearing. I looked toward the table again. “If he lives, I’m killing him. You know that, right?”
She huffed something close to a laugh. “Fair.”
“And then I’m going to pretend I never saw him.”
Blue slid an arm around my shoulders, careful of the equipment and sterile fields. “Sisters before misters, girlfriend.”
I leaned against her for half a second. “Always.”
Then she let me go because that was who Blue was. She never smothered. She gave exactly what was needed and trusted you to stand when she stepped away.
The surgery dragged in the way all surgeries did when the person on the table mattered too much.
Time inside a hospital could become slippery even on an ordinary shift.
Waiting in an OR for a man from my past to keep breathing turned it into a bad kind of prayer, one repeated with every glance toward the monitor.
When the surgeon finally stepped back and stripped off his gloves, the entire room seemed to shift with him. “He made it through.”
My knees nearly gave beneath me.
He wasn’t safe. Of course he wasn’t. The rest followed in careful pieces.
Critical condition. Medically induced coma.
Intensive care. The next twenty-four hours.
The doctor delivered each phrase in the tone people used when they knew better than to promise anything they couldn’t drag into existence with their own hands.
I heard all of it, but the only words that lodged were, he made it through.
The waiting room was full when we came out.
I stopped inside the doorway and took it in with one sweep.
Leather and denim filled the chairs, hard men sitting too still while the women around them watched every movement with tension braced through their shoulders.
The man who had spoken to Blue sat at the center with his elbows on his knees, but the moment he saw her, he surged to his feet so quickly the chair scraped behind him.
Another woman sat beside him, pretty in the polished, deliberate way some women were. I knew nothing about any of them, yet the way the room breathed told me she shouldn’t have been rubbing circles into his arm as though she had a right to soothe him.
It had nothing to do with me. Less than nothing. Still, I saw the moment he told her to sit back down, and the way Blue’s expression remained perfectly calm. I knew enough women to recognize how much was happening beneath it.
Blue gave the update, and everyone in the room seemed to breathe at once when she told them Jackson had made it through surgery. He wasn’t safe yet, but he was alive, and sometimes that was all a room needed to keep from splintering.
I stayed near the back because I didn’t trust my face. I also had no desire to be examined by a room full of club people while Jackson lay upstairs in a coma and Blue stood five feet away holding her own private war behind her teeth.
The man caught her arm before she could leave and said something too low for me to hear. She stiffened, but he guided her toward the hallway anyway. I watched them go for half a second before looking away.
It wasn’t my business.
Everything about the night seemed determined to drag old lives into the same room and lock the doors behind them. I didn’t have the energy to follow anyone else’s history.
Mine was upstairs unconscious.
Mine had almost died without knowing.
The thought had circled me since trauma, but it landed harder now that the room had gone quieter.
This time, it carried Jade’s face with it.
Jade at thirteen, asking casually and not casually at all whether I had ever truly been in love.
Jade at fifteen, rolling her eyes as she declared every boy in school an idiot.
Jade now, taller than me and sometimes studying old photographs with a look far too thoughtful for comfort.
What would I have told her if he had died tonight?
The question slid beneath my skin. Nothing I could have said would have been good enough or made sense of why the father she had never met died a few floors above me without ever knowing she existed.
I stepped into the hallway because the waiting room had become too crowded and warm, filled with breath that didn’t belong to me.
Late-night stillness washed over the hospital corridor in patches.
The building was never fully quiet, yet the noise had muted enough for me to hear the distant wheels of a linen cart and the faint electrical buzz overhead.
I walked until I found an empty stretch of wall, then stopped with my arms folded tightly across my middle.
I didn’t cry. Partly because I was too old and tired for the kind of collapse that somehow left a woman looking prettier afterward.
Mostly because the grief inside me wasn’t fresh enough for tears to know what to do with it.
It had lived there too long and changed shape too many times.
Heartbreak had hardened into anger, pride, and finally the dull ache of building a life around an absence and calling it healing because I had no better word.
Seeing him tonight had torn straight through all of it. It hadn’t fixed anything or answered a single question. It had only ripped open what I had spent years learning to live around.
I rested my head against the wall and closed my eyes.
Jackson.
Even inside my own mind, I couldn’t make him anyone else yet.
I saw him as he had looked in trauma, blood across his mouth and his skin drained pale. Behind that image came the memory of his smile at eighteen, slow and dangerous and finally honest when he caught me staring at him in our driveway.
The same mouth. The same man.
A lifetime now sat between those images, packed with everything he had never explained and everything I had learned to survive without.
I should have hated him more cleanly. That was the worst part.
Had he walked back into my life whole, smiling as though seventeen years were nothing more than bad weather, the anger might have been easier to hold. Instead, he returned bleeding and nearly died before I could ask why. The fear burned through every layer I had spent years laying over the wound.
Beneath them, the same old truth remained.
He had been the love of my life.
Maybe he still was.
I hated that too.
A few minutes later, I pushed away from the wall and returned to work. Shifts didn’t stop for personal disasters. People kept getting sick, getting hurt, and arriving through those doors regardless of whether my world had cracked open.
Jackson remained with me for the rest of the night, settled into the ache beneath my ribs and the tightness around my hands that no amount of scrubbing could erase. He lived inside the one terrible truth I could no longer pretend belonged only to me.
If Jackson Hayes lived through the night, then sooner or later everything was going to change.