Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Elias
The days in the hospital moved strangely.
Too slow in some hours and then somehow gone, a whole week passed before I had any clear sense of it.
My body had decided it needed everything I had just to keep going, and there was not much left over for things like tracking time or feeling the full weight of anything.
I was grateful for that, in a dull distant way.
The numbness felt like a gift someone had thought to leave.
I had two surgeries. The first was emergency, the night of the accident.
The second came three days later, to correct something the first had not been able to address.
Vera was there for both, waiting in whatever room they would let her wait in, handling the calls that needed handling and the paperwork that needed signing.
Doing the notifications that needed to go out, doing all of it with a competence and steadiness that I leaned on without fully realizing I was doing it.
When I woke up from the second surgery she was in the chair beside my bed with her coat still on and something pulled up on her phone, and she looked up when I opened my eyes and said, "There you are," in a voice that was quiet and a little rough around the edges, and I was grateful for her in a way I had no words for.
She brought me things from my grandparents' house.
I had asked for the recipe journals specifically, Nana's four volumes of handwritten notes and recipes going back three generations, and Vera brought all four without asking me to explain why I wanted them.
She just set them on my nightstand in a stack and left them there.
I held them sometimes without opening them, just the weight of them in my hands, the covers worn soft.
They smelled like the kitchen they'd lived in.
Like rosemary and something sweet and the particular warmth of a room where people had cooked together for years. It was as close as I could get.
A nurse named Claire had given me a small spiral notebook in those first days, pressing it gently into my bandaged hands one morning when she came in for vitals.
"Sometimes writing things down helps," she said, and she did not wait for me to respond before moving on to check the monitor, which I was grateful for because I did not have a response ready.
I started using it that afternoon. Medical terms first, the words the surgeons used that I knew I would need to understand later but could not process now, so I wrote them down in neat small letters so they would be there when I was ready.
Then other things. The way Pop always checked his mirrors before he changed lanes even on roads he knew by heart.
The sound of Nana's real laugh, the one that caught her off guard.
The red clip turning gold in the streetlamps and then going dark.
I wrote them down because I was afraid that if I did not put them somewhere solid they would go soft the way memories do, and I could not afford that.
Dr. Ansley came on the fourteenth day. I knew it was a Tuesday because Claire wrote the day on the whiteboard across from my bed each morning and I had gotten into the habit of checking it, a small anchor to the ordinary world outside the ward.
Vera had stepped out to get coffee, which meant I was alone when the knock came, and then the door opened and a small neat woman came in with a folder under her arm and the look on her face that I had been seeing on faces for two weeks, the one that meant someone was about to say something they had practiced saying.
She introduced herself and pulled the pale cream chair close to the bed and sat down in it, settling the folder on her knee without opening it yet.
She had reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck and calm dark eyes and the manner of someone who knew how to be present in a hard room.
She did not rush toward what she had come to say.
She also did not draw it out. There was a steadiness to her that I found, in the moment, easier to be around than sympathy.
"I want to go through your follow-up scans with you," she said, her voice even and unhurried. "There are some things I want to make sure you understand fully."
I reached over to the nightstand for my journal and settled it open in my lap, uncapping the pen I'd kept clipped to the cover. "Okay," I said.
She went through it carefully and in order, which I was grateful for.
The internal trauma from the accident had been extensive.
The surgeries had addressed what they could address.
But the imaging had shown damage in my lower abdomen that the surgeries had not been able to repair.
The damage was to my reproductive system.
She said it plainly and carefully, the way she said everything else: I would not be able to carry children. The word for it was irreversible.
She kept going, explaining what that word meant in practical terms, what it would and would not affect, what I should and should not expect.
I wrote as she spoke, the pen moving across the page in my close handwriting, getting down the specifics.
At some point I wrote the word itself and then drew a small box around it in the margin.
Not to mark it as important. I knew it was important.
I drew the box because I needed to do something with my hands that was not falling apart.
I was an Omega. I had grown up understanding what that was supposed to mean, what the shape of that future looked like.
A pack, eventually. A home. Children, if I wanted them.
It was not the only thing I had ever wanted but it had been part of the picture for so long I had never really thought of it as something that could be taken away.
I sat with that information and kept writing and kept breathing.
When she finished she folded her hands and looked at me steadily, not with pity, just with attention. "Do you have questions?" she asked.
I looked down at what I'd written. "Will it affect other things?" I asked. "Not just that. Other things. My health."
She understood what I was really asking.
She told me no, the damage was specific, it would not affect my general health or my lifespan or my capacity for a relationship and a life.
She told me there were options worth knowing about when I was ready to know about them, and she left a card tucked inside a pamphlet that she set on my nightstand simply and without ceremony, and then she stood and said she would check in the following morning, and she left.
I sat for a while with it open in my lap and looked at that box.
Vera came back with two coffees and took one look at my face and set them both down on the table without a word and sat on the edge of my bed and put her arm around me, and I turned into her shoulder and breathed in and out and held on while the thing I had been trying to keep at arm's length arrived all at once.
She did not say anything. She just held on. It was exactly right.
When I was done I sat up and took one of the coffees and looked at the whiteboard that said Tuesday and then looked at the small box I had drawn around that word, and I thought: this is what I have to carry now.
A new thing to carry. I thought about the weight of it, whether I could manage it alongside everything else I was already holding, and I decided that I would have to, and that was the end of that particular conversation with myself.
The Steele Pack came on Thursday.
I heard them before I saw them, their voices low in the corridor outside my room.
Carter Steele knocked before coming in. I noticed and appreciated it.
He was the head Alpha of their pack, dark-haired and composed in a way that had always made me feel steady in his company.
He moved through the world with a deliberateness that made you feel like he thought about what his presence meant to the people around him.
I had liked that about him from our first meeting.
Devon and Kyle came in behind him. Devon was carrying a paper bag from the bakery on Clement Street, the good one, the one whose cinnamon rolls I had mentioned in passing one Saturday morning months ago when we were all at breakfast together, the kind of offhand comment you make without expecting anyone to file it away.
He had filed it away. He set the bag on my tray table and took the rolls out and arranged them on a napkin with the attention he brought to everything, and I felt something move in my chest at the sight of them.
Kyle had flowers, something simple and yellow and cheerful, and he found the windowsill for them with the slightly intent focus of someone determined to do this right.
"We've been worried about you," Kyle said, pulling his chair closer than he strictly needed to. He had an open face, Kyle, the kind that showed everything. Right now it showed that he meant it.
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry it took a while to be up for visitors." My voice came out more even than I expected.
"Don't apologize," Devon said firmly, settling into his chair.
He had warm eyes and a directness I had always found easy to be around.
"Absolutely do not apologize. You don't owe us anything.
" He pushed one of the cinnamon rolls toward me on its napkin.
"Eat. You look like the hospital has been feeding you cardboard. "
"Pretty much," I said, and reached for it. The first bite was warm and sweet and so exactly right that my eyes stung for a second in a way I had not expected. I pressed the feeling down. "These are really good. Thank you for remembering."
"Of course," Devon said, like it was nothing, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to have kept that detail for months and driven across the city to act on it.