5
Lila
The room is too bright.
That is the first thing wrong with it. Not the blood. Not the screaming monitor. Not the way my hands are already slick and my throat feels raw before I understand why.
The light.
Harsh. White. Unforgiving.
It pours over the trauma bay until everything beneath it looks overexposed and unreal.
Blue is on one side of the bed with Evan just beyond her shoulder. Someone behind me calls out numbers I don’t want to hear, but none of it matters because Jackson is on the gurney in front of me, and he is slipping away so quickly I can feel it happening before the monitor confirms it.
“No.”
My voice sounds small in the room, swallowed by movement, machinery, and the ugly, wet drag of his failing breath.
He doesn’t hear me.
Or maybe he does.
His face is too still, his skin pale beneath the blood. There is so much of it. I keep pressing where I’m supposed to press, doing what I was trained to do, what I have done for strangers more times than I can count, but this is different.
Nothing inside me can reach that clean, detached place where the work usually lives.
Every part of me is raw and terrified, reaching for him while he drifts farther away.
“Come on,” Blue snaps, though I don’t know whether she is talking to him, the room, or me.
The monitor screams.
Then it flattens.
For one impossible second, every sound around me stretches thin until the entire world narrows to that single, merciless line.
“No.”
This time, the word tears out of me.
Hands move around the bed. Someone charges the paddles. A voice calls clear.
Jackson’s body jerks beneath the shock before collapsing against the mattress again. The second one changes nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
The line remains flat while the alarm shrieks through the room and chaos breaks open around it.
I look at his face, and something inside me splits.
“No!” My voice breaks around the word. “No, don’t—”
The room doesn’t stop.
Nobody stops.
But I do.
Because I know.
I know in the deepest place there is to know anything, somewhere medicine, evidence, and protocol cannot reach. I know the same way I knew he had left before anyone spoke the words aloud seventeen years ago.
The same way I knew when I first looked at Jade that Jackson had been written into our lives in a way I could never erase.
He is leaving.
Again.
“No!” I lean over him, beyond caring who hears me or sees the blood coating my gloves. My voice tears itself apart as the whole room watches me unravel. “Don’t leave me again. Not before I can tell you. Please, Jackson. Not before I can tell you.”
His face doesn’t change.
The line doesn’t move.
Then I woke with the words still clawing their way out of my throat.
I came upright hard and gasping, my whole body jerking with the motion. Blankets tangled around my legs, and my damp nightshirt clung to my back. Hair stuck to the nape of my neck while my heart hammered with enough force to hurt.
For one wild second, I didn’t know where I was.
Trauma lights still burned behind my eyes. The monitor continued screaming somewhere inside my skull, and I could hear my own voice begging him not to leave.
Then my bedroom emerged around me beneath the gray wash of early morning, dim and familiar, and the nightmare broke apart against the simple shape of home.
My door flew open.
“Mom?”
Jade stood in the doorway barefoot and wide awake, her dark hair tangled around her shoulders. One hand braced against the frame as though she had run in too quickly to stop cleanly.
The expression on her face looked too old for sixteen.
She wasn’t frightened exactly. She was alert, worried, and ready for whatever came next.
I dragged in a breath that scraped all the way down and pushed myself against the headboard. “I’m okay.”
The lie came automatically, though my voice sounded wrecked enough to betray it.
Jade remained in the doorway. “You were yelling.”
I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum as though I could steady the frantic pounding beneath it. “Bad dream.”
She stepped farther into the room, cautious but unconvinced. The light spilling in from the hallway caught the crease between her brows.
“What was it about?”
“Nothing.”
The answer came too fast.
We both heard it.
Her eyes narrowed. “Mom.”
I exhaled and looked past her toward the hallway because it was easier than facing the girl who had my eyes and her father’s mouth. “It was only a nightmare. I’m fine.”
Jade folded her arms. “I heard you.”
Of course she had.
Heat crawled beneath my skin. The shame had little to do with her seeing me afraid and everything to do with what I had said.
Whatever I had buried deeply enough to survive the last seventeen years had apparently decided sleep was a reasonable time to throw open every locked door.
“What did you hear?” I asked.
Her expression softened a fraction. “You yelled, ‘No, don’t leave me again. Not before I can tell you.’”
The room went still around us.
I held my face carefully blank. “We had a patient last night,” I said after a moment, forcing my voice into something even. “It was a close call. The shift was rough, and I’m exhausted. My brain is taking everything I shoved aside at work and throwing it back at me while I sleep.”
Jade studied me for a second too long.
She had always been sharper than was convenient.
Finally, she nodded once, though the look in her eyes told me she believed only the pieces she could verify. “Okay.”
I attempted a smile. “Okay.”
Silence settled between us. It wasn’t heavy, exactly.
It was watchful.
Jade glanced toward the kitchen. “I’ll start breakfast.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.” She paused near the doorway. “But I’m hungry, and if I leave you alone in here too long, you’re going to think yourself into a bad mood.”
Despite everything, I snorted. “That’s rude.”
“That’s accurate.”
There she was.
I scrubbed both hands over my face and pushed the blankets from my legs. “Give me ten minutes.”
“Seven,” she called over her shoulder as she disappeared down the hall. “You move slowly when you’re emotionally compromised.”
“Teenagers are supposed to be less annoying before eight in the morning.”
“Single-parent households adapt,” she called back.
Seven minutes later, I found Jade commandeering both the stove and toaster with the easy ownership of a child raised by a mother who worked shifts and trusted her to be capable.
She wore flannel sleep shorts and one of my old college T-shirts, moving between the stove and toaster with a spatula in one hand while eggs cooked and coffee filled the kitchen with its familiar bitterness.
She looked completely at home there. Ordinary.
Safe. The sight caught somewhere beneath my ribs, because Jackson had missed every version of this girl and had no idea what she had grown into.
Morning light spilled through the window above the sink, softening the room around her. Jade glanced up when I entered, her gaze passing quickly over my face in a check she tried to disguise.
“You look terrible.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“I made eggs.”
“That softens the insult.”
“It was constructive.”
I moved past her toward the coffee maker. “You are sixteen. Your feedback is neither requested nor billable.”
“Yet,” she said, sliding eggs onto two plates. “Give me time.”
I poured coffee and leaned against the counter while she finished breakfast.
She moved through my kitchen because it belonged to her.
Because for all the things Jackson missed, for every year he had been gone, this was mine. This girl. This life. All these mornings stitched together from sarcasm, school deadlines, burnt toast, and me pretending I wasn’t terrified by how quickly she was growing up.
“Chemistry test today,” I reminded her, because routine was comforting and because if I didn’t say it, she might assume I had sustained a concussion overnight.
Jade rolled her eyes and set a plate in front of me. “I know.”
“And your Of Mice and Men paper is due next week.”
“I know.”
“And Sunday dinner at your grandfather’s is still happening, so don’t act surprised when he starts asking whether you’ve given any more thought to your future.”
Jade groaned as she dropped into the chair across from me. “By future, you mean Grandpa asking about college, Uncle Matty asking what I plan to do with my sketchbooks, and everyone staring at me like I’m supposed to map out my entire life before dessert?”
“Something like that.”
She stabbed a piece of egg with unnecessary force. “Can I become mysteriously unavailable every Sunday until I’m twenty-five?”
“No.”
“What if I fake mono?”
“You’d have to stop looking so healthy.”
“What if I looked fragile and artistic?”
“You already look artistic.” I lifted my mug. “Fragile would require more commitment.”
She gave me a flat look. “Grandpa is going to get that hopeful look in his eyes. Uncle Matty will call me Doodles and ask whether I’ve considered art school again, and somebody will put Grandma Rose’s recipe box on the table like it’s another side dish.”
My smile came before I could stop it. “That does sound likely.”
Jade pointed her fork at me. “See? You know I’m suffering.”
“You are being loved aggressively.”
“That still counts as suffering.”
A laugh escaped me, softer than usual but real, and some of the pressure inside my chest eased enough to let me breathe around it.
Jade’s expression shifted into quiet satisfaction. “There. That’s better.”
“What is?”
“You laughing.” She took another bite of egg. “It’s less creepy in here when you do that instead of staring into the void like a haunted woman in a lighthouse.”
I nearly inhaled my coffee. “A lighthouse?”
She shrugged. “I was going to say haunted Victorian widow, but the lighthouse felt more specific.”
“You need less internet.”
“You need more sleep.”
We ate in easy silence for a while.
Outside, the neighborhood had begun to wake. A car door slammed two houses down. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked. The ordinary sounds of morning carried on around us, steady and familiar.
I watched Jade over the rim of my mug while she frowned at her eggs as though they had personally offended her.
The nightmare pressed back in before I could stop it: the trauma bay under those brutal lights, the flatline cutting across the monitor, my own voice breaking open as I begged Jackson not to leave before I could tell him.
I lowered my gaze before Jade caught whatever moved across my face.
“Mom.”
When I looked up, her fork had gone still halfway to her plate. She didn’t push or demand an explanation. She only watched me, waiting with that quiet patience that always made lying to her harder.
“You sure you’re okay?”
I held her gaze and gave her the closest version of the truth I could manage. “I’m tired. Last night was rough.”
Jade studied me for another moment before nodding. “Okay.”
It wasn’t belief. It was permission to keep the rest to myself a little longer, and she granted it even though we both knew the conversation wasn’t finished.
After breakfast, Jade collected the plates without being asked.
I stood at the sink rinsing coffee from my mug while she talked around a bite of toast about Chloe’s latest disaster, a chemistry mnemonic she swore was genius, and whether Guncle Evan would be offended if she stole one of his better cardigan combinations for a Halloween costume.
Jade eventually headed down the hall to get dressed, leaving the house steadier behind her.
It wasn’t healed. It wasn’t safe from whatever came next.
But it was steady enough to stand inside.
I remained alone in the kitchen, both hands braced against the counter and closed my eyes.
The nightmare still clung to me, along with the image of Jackson unconscious in the ICU while the ventilator breathed for him and every word I had never said sat hard behind my teeth.
At the same time, Sunday dinner at my father’s was waiting, Jade had a chemistry test and a paper on Of Mice and Men, and our breakfast dishes were cooling in the sink.
My life kept moving in all its ordinary directions while a man from my past lay unconscious ten minutes away, with no idea his daughter had just stood at my stove and made eggs.
My life had always been good at splitting itself into pieces and expecting me to carry them all.
I opened my eyes, rinsed my mug, and started getting ready for the day.