Chapter 36
CHLOE
The hospital waiting room was white and cold and smelled like disinfectant and dread.
I was crying. Not the quiet kind. Not the controlled kind that I had mastered over years of holding myself together in front of Emma, the kind where you swallow it down and breathe through it and pretend the tears are not there.
This was the other kind. The kind that ripped out of you without permission, that shook your whole body and made sounds you did not recognize as your own.
My daughter was in surgery. My six-year-old daughter, who collected dinosaurs and sang made-up songs and called her father Papa with a certainty that could move mountains, was behind a set of doors I could not open, and doctors I did not know were working on her foot, and I was sitting in a plastic chair with mascara running down my face and my hands shaking so badly I could not hold the cup of water the nurse had given me.
Sawyer was beside me.
He was not crying. He was not shaking. He was not doing anything.
He sat in the chair next to mine with his back straight and his hands on his knees and his face completely, terrifyingly blank.
No emotion. No expression. Nothing. Like someone had reached inside him and turned off every switch, shut down every circuit, left nothing running except the basic mechanics of breathing and sitting upright.
I had seen him angry. I had seen him soft. I had seen him broken open by tenderness and burning with fury and everything in between. But I had never seen him like this. Empty. A man who had gone so far inside himself that the outside was just a shell, a structure with no one home.
“Sawyer,” I said.
Nothing. His eyes were fixed on the wall across from us. Not seeing it. Not seeing anything.
I took his hand. His fingers were cold. Stiff.
They did not respond to mine, did not curl around them the way they always did, and the absence of that reflex scared me more than anything else because Sawyer Cole always held my hand back.
Always. It was the one thing I could count on in any situation, the automatic, unconscious grip of a man who reached for me the way he reached for air.
“Sawyer,” I said again. Firmer.
His jaw moved. A small shift. The first sign that there was still someone inside the blank exterior.
Then his eyes closed, tight, and when they opened again, there was something in them that I recognized.
Not anger. Not grief. The thing that lived underneath both, the thing that had been following him since before.
“It is not repeating,” he said. His voice was low. Hoarse. Like the words were being dragged out of him across broken glass. “The past is not repeating itself again, right? What happened to my brother is not happening to Emma.”
“It is not the same.”
“I was not there for Jimmy. I was not fast enough. I was not smart enough. I did not see it coming.” His hands began to shake.
Not the fine tremor of cold or nerves. The deep, structural shaking of a man whose foundation was cracking.
“And today I was there. I was right there. I had the gun. I shot him. And he still hurt her. He still got to her. I was standing right there and my daughter got shot.”
“Sawyer…”
“I feel so useless right now.” His voice broke on the last word. Cracked straight down the middle like a beam that had taken too much weight, and the sound of it, the raw, exposed pain of a man who had been strong for everyone and had nothing left to be strong with, made my tears come harder.
He was shaking. His whole body. Hands, arms, shoulders, the tremors running through him like aftershocks, and I watched the mask he had been wearing since we arrived at the hospital finally come apart.
Not all at once. In pieces. The jaw unclenching.
The eyes going bright. The breath hitching in a way that had nothing to do with breathing and everything to do with the sobs he was trying to swallow.
I pulled him to me. Wrapped my arms around him and pulled his head down to my shoulder and held him the way he had held me so many times, with everything I had, pouring every ounce of strength I possessed into the grip because he needed it more than I did right now and that was what we did. We took turns being strong.
“Our daughter is strong,” I said against his hair.
My voice was shaking but the words were not.
The words were the steadiest thing I had.
“She is stronger than both of us. Stronger than you think, stronger than I think. She survived Jonathan’s house.
She survived the running. She sat in that gymnasium with a gun to her head and she did not cry, Sawyer.
A six-year-old girl with a gun to her head and she held it together because she believed her papa would come. And you did.”
He made a sound against my shoulder. Not a word. Something deeper. Something that had been locked away for a very long time.
“She will fight this,” I continued. “A bullet in her foot is not going to stop Emma Matthews. Nothing stops that girl. She gets that from you. The stubbornness. The refusal to go down. She will fight this and she will win and she will be running around that cabin within weeks demanding we build her a dinosaur museum.” I pressed my lips to the top of his head.
“We need to be strong for her. That is the only job right now. Being strong for Emma. The last thing she wants is us blaming ourselves. She loves her papa so much, Sawyer. She loves you. She would not want you sitting here tearing yourself apart.”
He held on. His arms around me, tight, his face pressed into my shoulder, his body gradually, slowly, stopping its shaking. Not all at once. In stages. The way a storm dies down. The worst of it passing, then the tremors easing, then the breathing steadying, then the stillness.
The doctor came out forty minutes later.
She was a woman in her fifties with calm eyes and steady hands and the demeanor of someone who had delivered both good news and bad news enough times to know how to carry both. She looked at us sitting in our plastic chairs with our red eyes and our tangled hands and she smiled. Small. But real.
“Emma is stable,” she said. “The bullet fractured two small bones in her foot. We have repaired the damage and set the bones. She is going to need a cast and several weeks of recovery, but she will make a full recovery. She is going to be fine.”
The air left my body. All of it. Every molecule of oxygen I had been holding since the moment I watched Jonathan’s gun fire at my daughter evacuated my lungs in one long, shuddering exhale, and I bent forward and pressed my hands to my face and cried.
Relief. Pure, liquid, devastating relief that poured out of me in sobs I could not stop and did not try to.
Sawyer’s hand was on my back. Steady now. Steadier than before. The news had given him something to hold onto, a fact to anchor himself to, and I felt the change in him. The soldier reassembling. The father finding his footing.
“Can we see her?” he asked.
“She is waking up now. You can go in.”
We went in together. Hand in hand. The room was small and bright and full of the sounds of monitors beeping softly, and in the center of the bed, looking impossibly small against the white sheets, was our daughter.
Her foot was wrapped in a cast. Her face was pale. Her eyes were closed. Sir Chomps-a-Lot was tucked under her arm because someone, a nurse or a paramedic or an angel in scrubs, had made sure the dinosaur stayed with her through everything.
Sawyer sat in the chair beside the bed. I sat on the other side. We held her hands, one each, and we waited. The room was quiet except for the monitors and our breathing and the soft hum of the hospital going about its business around us.
“You should sleep,” Sawyer said to me. His voice was gentle. Worn. The voice of a man who had been through a war today and was trying to take care of his people even when he had nothing left.
“I am not leaving her.”
“Sleep here. In the chair. I will watch her.”
I did not want to sleep. I wanted to sit here and hold my daughter’s hand and stare at the rise and fall of her chest until my eyes stopped working.
But the exhaustion was a physical thing, heavy and absolute, pressing down on me like a weight I could not lift, and Sawyer’s voice was steady and his hand was on mine and I trusted him to watch her while I rested.
I closed my eyes. Leaned my head against the side of the bed. And fell asleep with my daughter’s fingers in mine and Sawyer’s presence like a wall between us and the world.
He did not sleep. I knew this because every time I drifted up from the heavy, dreamless dark, I could hear him.
His breathing, steady and deliberate, the breathing of a man who was keeping himself awake through sheer willpower.
The creak of his chair when he shifted. The soft sound of his thumb moving across Emma’s hand, back and forth, a rhythm he probably did not know he was making.
Once, I surfaced enough to open my eyes just a crack, and he was leaning forward with his elbows on the bed and his face in his hands and his shoulders shaking with sobs he was trying to keep silent.
He did not know I was watching. I closed my eyes and let him have that grief privately, the way he needed to have it, because Sawyer Cole did not cry in front of people.
He cried alone. And the fact that he was alone in a room with two people he loved more than anything and still felt he needed to hide it told me everything about the man and everything about the walls he was still learning to take down.
I woke to his hand on my shoulder. Gentle. Shaking me softly.
“Chloe,” he whispered. “She is awake.”
I opened my eyes. The room was dim. Hours had passed. The light outside the window had changed from afternoon bright to the soft gray of early evening, and the monitors were still beeping their steady rhythm.
Emma’s eyes were open.
Green. Bright. Tired but present and aware and looking at Sawyer with an expression that was far too wise for a six-year-old, an expression that said she understood more about what had happened today than any child should have to understand.
Sawyer was beside her. His hand holding hers. His face was wet. Tears running down his cheeks without shame, without restraint, the tears of a father who had watched his daughter come through the other side of the worst day of his life.
“I am sorry, Emma,” he said. His voice was wrecked. Raw. “I am so sorry. I should have been faster. I should have gotten to you sooner. I should have stopped him before…”
“Papa.” Emma’s voice was small and hoarse and full of the kind of gentle authority that children carry when they are telling their parents something important. She squeezed his hand with her tiny fingers. “You are my savior, Papa.”
He closed his eyes. A sob escaped. One. Just one. The kind of sob that carries the weight of everything a man has been holding and cannot hold anymore.
“It is not your fault that there are bad people,” Emma said. “You came for me. You always come for me. That is why I was not scared. Because I knew you would come.”
He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to her hand.
His shoulders shook. And Emma, our six-year-old daughter with a cast on her foot and a dinosaur under her arm and more courage than any soldier I had ever heard of, lifted her other hand and placed it on top of her father’s head and held it there.
“Don’t cry, Papa,” she whispered. “I am okay. See? I am right here.”
I stood behind Sawyer. Put my hands on his shoulders.
Felt the tremors running through him and held on, anchoring him the way he had anchored me, and the three of us stayed like that in the hospital room with the monitors beeping and the evening light fading and the world outside continuing to turn.
Emma looked at me over Sawyer’s bowed head. Her green eyes, so much like his, found mine and held them.
“Is Papa going to be okay, Mama?”
“Yes, baby. Papa is going to be okay.”
“Good. Because I need him to carry me until my foot gets better. He is the only one strong enough.”
Sawyer laughed. Wet and broken and real, the kind of laugh that comes from the same place as tears and sounds exactly the same.
He lifted his head and looked at his daughter and she looked back at him and the love between them, the fierce, unbreakable, impossible love between a father and his daughter, filled the room until there was no space left for anything else.
“I will carry you as long as you need,” he said.
“Even when I am old?”
“Even when you are old.”
“Even when I am as tall as you?”
“You will never be as tall as me.”
“Mama, Papa is being mean.”
“Papa is being honest, baby.”
Emma smiled. Small and tired and brave. And Sawyer held her hand and I held his shoulders and the hospital room held all of us, and we were still here. Broken in places. Bruised. But still here. Together. And that was enough.
That was everything.