Chapter 22 Unspoken Words
Unspoken Words
ELI
Morning came in fragments—voices at the doorway, the shuffle of rubber soles. I was somewhere between dreaming and waking when I realized the noise was for me.
A nurse smiled, too positive for the hour. “We’re going to get you sitting up a bit today, Mr. Hawke.”
Her words didn’t quite compute. Sitting up sounded like a normal thing, something easy. It wasn’t until the physical therapist wheeled in a tray of equipment that my heart started pounding.
Adrian was standing in the corner, still in yesterday’s clothes. The shadows under his eyes told me he hadn’t slept again. He straightened when the therapist introduced herself, his entire demeanor shifting from husband to doctor in half a beat.
“We’ll take it slow,” she said kindly. “Just a few degrees at a time.”
Slow turned out to be an understatement.
The moment the bed angled upward, fire shot through my ribs. My lungs seized. Sweat prickled across my temples. Every inhale scraped.
“Stop,” I managed. “God—just—wait.”
Adrian was beside me instantly, one hand braced near the control panel, the other hovering over my shoulder but not quite touching.
“You’re okay,” he murmured. “It’s just your intercostals protesting. You’re breathing too shallow. Try slower.”
I wanted to snap that there was no such thing as try slower when every breath felt like gravel, but then I saw the look in his eyes—calm, clinical, but pleading too—like if I gave up now, it would undo something vital in him.
So I didn’t give up, even though I wanted to protest alongside my intercostals.
We inched up again. Ten degrees. Fifteen. Twenty.
My arms trembled, and my vision blurred. The therapist guided me to roll my shoulders, to turn my head side to side. “Range of motion,” she called it. It felt more like torture.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s see if we can swing your legs a bit.”
My right leg moved fine. The left… not so much. Pain flared down my thigh, and I sucked in air through my teeth. Adrian’s voice cut through everything.
“That’s enough for now.”
The therapist hesitated. “A few more minutes would—”
“He’s tachycardic. Look at his pulse ox,” he said, already reading the monitor.
She glanced at the screen, then nodded. “All right. We’ll stop here.”
I collapsed back against the pillow, chest heaving. My whole body quavered, part effort, part adrenaline. The therapist adjusted my pillow and offered a faint smile.
“You did great.”
Great. I’d survived sitting up.
When she left, Adrian stayed, adjusting the blanket that had slipped down to my waist. His hand lingered there for a beat longer than necessary, eyes searching my face.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
“Define okay.”
His mouth curved in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Alive, upright, and still fighting me about definitions.”
That earned him a wheezy laugh. “Guess I’m fine, then.”
He nodded, a low exhale leaving his chest. “You’ll get stronger every day.”
“You make it sound like a promise.”
“It is.”
And the way he said it—quiet, sure, a man swearing an oath—made me believe it, if only for that single moment.
Night in the ICU wasn’t quiet so much as muted.
Machines whispered. Oxygen hissed. Somewhere down the hall, a monitor alarmed, muffled by distance and walls. I drifted in and out of sleep, body too heavy to move, mind too full to rest.
I’d thought silence meant peace once. Now it just meant there was nothing left to distract me from how much everything hurt.
The nurse had dimmed the lights after Adrian left.
I’d insisted after he kept nodding off. He promised he’d only be gone for a few hours—to shower, grab a bite, check in with the department—but I’d seen the way his hand lingered on the rail before he turned away.
The way he looked at me with fear, terrified I’d stop breathing the second he wasn’t here to watch.
The truth was, I was afraid of that too. And the moment the door clicked behind him, the air changed. It was as if the room exhaled him, leaving only the echo.
The physical therapist had been in earlier, trying to move my arms, my legs, testing muscle tone. My chest felt packed with glass. Every motion was a reminder that recovery wasn’t linear—it was a climb. And goddamn, I was so tired already.
Every inhale scraped like sandpaper. Exhaustion haunted me every waking minute. I turned my head toward the window, wincing at the pull along my ribs, and stared at the city lights beyond the glass. Somewhere out there, people were laughing, spilling drinks, hailing cabs. Living.
I tried to imagine joining them again, walking, working, coming home to… what? The ache that rose had nothing to do with injury.
For months before the accident, we’d barely spoken except in arguments. I’d told myself that space was better, that maybe we both needed time apart to remember how we used to fit. But now, lying here, tethered to tubes and pain, all I could think about was the things I hadn’t said.
I replayed the sound of Adrian’s voice when he’d whispered, You’re okay. The way his thumb had brushed my hand. That even, grounded tone he used when the world was falling apart, and he refused to let it.
God, I’d missed that voice.
I stared at the ceiling until my eyes blurred, blinking against the hot sting that came anyway.
In the dim light, I lifted my hand to study the bracelet resting on my wrist. I didn’t remember putting it there. My fingers were clumsy against the rough braided vine. Adrian must’ve done it. The memory of his voice from that afternoon replayed in fragments—
“You remember this?”
“The vineyard… You looked beautiful that night.”
The vineyard.
Our first anniversary. The place we swore we’d go back to every year and never did.
I hadn’t thought about that night in a long time. The moonlight, the wine, his mouth on mine, the way he’d laughed when I said the bracelet would fall apart in a week.
And now here it was—frayed but whole—a ghost of a promise we’d both let fade. I turned my wrist, tracing the edge of the band. The skin beneath it was pale and soft, unfamiliar. I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I didn’t feel like anyone.
Earlier, I’d told him about the dream. About the minutes I’d experienced when everything went dark, how they were all of him. Every single one. The look on his face when I said it still haunted me. Hope, regret, something else I couldn’t name.
He kissed my forehead. Whispered, “I’m here now.”
But for how long?
I stared at the bracelet again, my chest tightening around the question. Adrian had that look lately, the one he wore when he was planning something. Schedules. Appointments. Recovery timelines. The same look he used to have before a big surgery. Efficient. Focused.
It was easier to live in logistics than in emotion.
Maybe that’s what this was. A coping mechanism.
I wanted to believe otherwise. I wanted to believe the tenderness in his touch meant more than duty, more than penance.
But lying there in the dark, I couldn’t stop thinking about the separation papers sitting somewhere in a drawer beside our bed.
The way the word almost still hung between husband and ex.
How long would he stay?
Until I could walk again? Until I could drive myself to therapy? Until the guilt wore off?
My throat burned. I turned my face into the pillow and whispered, “You don’t have to keep your promises now.” I hated how small the words sounded. “But I hope you do,” I added, quieter. “Just one more time.”
They said it was good for me to get some air.
A milestone, they called it. “A brief supervised walk,” said one nurse, as if I were an experiment on the move.
Adrian signed the order himself for the wheelchair transport, his pen scraping across the clipboard with a doctor’s efficiency. But the tremor in his hand gave him away.
I used to love watching him write his name. Back in college, he’d practiced his future signature for hours—“Adrian Hawke, M.D.” scrawled over and over on scratch paper while I studied beside him in the library. He’d tilt the page, frown, start again, determined to make it perfect.
You act like you’re signing autographs, I’d teased.
Someday, he’d said, flashing that stupid grin, I might be.
Now his handwriting looked nothing like that. It was tight, uneven, rushed. A doctor’s scrawl instead of a dreamer’s flourish. And it hit me, with a small, stupid pang, that somewhere between those scratch pages and this clipboard, he’d lost something too.
The garden sat just beyond the main corridor, fenced with wrought iron and trimmed in autumn flowers that looked too colorful to be real. The first breath of air hit like cold water, sharp and raw.
Adrian pushed my chair down the narrow path, gravel crunching beneath his shoes. He was quiet. So was I. There was too much to say and too little strength to say it.
“Are you okay?” he asked finally, stopping beside a patch of marigolds.
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what that word meant anymore. Okay was relative. Okay was alive. Okay was sitting here when I probably shouldn’t be.
“It feels different out here,” I said.
He crouched beside me, eyes flicking between my face and the flowers. “You were in a bed for nearly two weeks. Your body’s still adjusting.”
I smiled faintly. “Not just my body.”
He didn’t ask what I meant. Maybe he already knew.
The breeze lifted my hair, carrying the scent of something familiar, not our house, not our sheets, but the citrus of his cologne. He’d switched brands months ago; I remembered complaining it smelled too clean, too clinical.
Now, I wanted to drown in it.
Adrian rested his hand on the arm of the wheelchair, close but not touching. His hand brushed mine as he adjusted the blanket, fingers still trembling faintly.
I thought of those same hands years ago, tracing loops of his name across notebook paper, steady and sure, building a life we hadn’t yet ruined.
Now they shook just to keep me warm.