Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
MYA
P ain doesn’t come first.
Light does.
Blinding and white and clinical—like it doesn’t care what it burns through.
Then sound.
Distant. Hollow. Beeping. Whispering. Footsteps like thunder muffled in cotton.
Then…
A voice.
Fletch’s voice.
I know it like I know how to breathe. Only right now, I don’t know how to do either.
“Come on, Mya,” he whispers, so close it feels like he’s in my bloodstream. “Come back to me.”
The air feels thick. Like honey in my lungs.
I blink. Once. Twice. The light stabs through my skull. Everything is slow. Wrong.
White walls. Tubes. Machines. A plastic taste in my mouth that screams hospital.
I try to move.
Nothing happens.
“Mya?” His voice cracks, and I feel his fingers lace gently through mine. Warm. Real. Here.
That’s what breaks me.
My fingers twitch.
His breath catches, a sound like someone’s drowning in relief.
“Mya. Oh my god.” The chair screeches back. A hand cups my cheek. “You’re here. You’re really here.”
My eyelids flutter again, this time more certain. My neck won’t move, but my eyes do—dragging until I find him.
Fletch.
Pale. Unshaven. Eyes ringed with the kind of grief you can only earn by waiting.
And surviving.
“Fletch?” My voice is cracked glass. Thin. Fragile. Barely there.
“I’m here.” He presses a kiss to my knuckles. “I’ve been here.”
I blink up at him. It feels like I’m swimming through oil. “What… happened?”
He closes his eyes for a beat, breathing like he’s been holding it for three months.
“You were in a medically induced coma,” he says quietly. “After the accident. They said your body needed time to heal. You were twenty-seven weeks when they had to deliver…”
My chest jerks.
The babies.
My hand flies to my belly—or tries to. It’s restrained by tape and IV lines, a tangled mess of plastic and pain.
“Where are they?” My voice rips free in a panic. “Where are my babies?”
“They’re okay,” he says quickly, catching my hand. “They’re okay, Mya. I promise.”
Tears well in his eyes. Not the dramatic kind. The kind that ache to be believed.
“They were born early. NICU early. But they’re fighters. Like their mom.”
My heart lurches so violently I think it might short-circuit the monitor.
“They’re… alive?”
He nods, voice thick. “Yeah, baby. They’re alive. They’re tiny and stubborn and absolutely perfect.”
Tears blur the edges of everything. The room. The machines. Him.
I want to see them.
I want to hold them.
But I can’t move. Can’t even lift my arm. And that breaks me more than anything.
“They’re just down the hall,” he says, kissing the back of my hand. “We’ll get there. One day at a time, okay? Right now, I just need you to breathe.”
I close my eyes, a sob catching in my throat. It feels like grief and joy are ripping me in half, a brutal kind of whiplash between the world I built in my mind and the one I’ve woken up in.
“They’re alive,” I whisper.
“They are.”
“And you’re really here.”
He nods, brushing his thumb over my cheek. “I never left.”
I swallow hard. “But I saw you. In the dream. You told me none of it was real.”
His expression softens. “It wasn’t.”
“But this is.”
“Yeah,” he says, kissing my forehead, voice breaking as he presses his promise into my skin. “This is real.”
He pulls back, brushing a hand gently through my hair. “I’m going to get the doctor now, okay? They’ll want to see you awake.”
I nod, barely, everything still hazy and heavy and not mine yet.
But when he squeezes my hand and whispers, “I’ll be right back, Mya. Don’t go anywhere,” I believe him.
Because for the first time in what feels like forever, I don’t want to.
The doctor smells like soap and sleep deprivation, like the kind of man who hasn’t left the hospital in days. His scrubs are wrinkled. His expression is not.
“Miss Sequera,” he says gently, eyes flicking to the monitors before landing on me. “You’ve been through something extraordinary.”
Extraordinary.
Not tragic. Not traumatic. Not a miracle or a mess. Just… extraordinary. Like I went on a sabbatical through a snowstorm and came back with a story worth telling.
I blink at him, trying to piece together time from the thin thread of moments since I opened my eyes. Fletch’s hand. The hollowness in my stomach. The strange, sterile weight of everything.
“You were in a medically induced coma,” the doctor explains, voice low and even. “Three months.”
Three months.
The word echoes through me like a bell underwater—muted and enormous.
“You were in a critical car accident. Placental abruption, internal bleeding. We had to deliver the babies early to save all three of you. It was… close.” His eyes flicker. “But you made it. They made it.”
I don’t say anything because I can’t. The words back up in my throat like traffic on a bridge that’s already snapped. It’s too much. It’s all too much.
“Your sons are doing well. They’re in the NICU, but they’re fighters.” He smiles. “I imagine they get that from you.”
I look down at my hands. They’re trembling.
When the doctor leaves, it’s like the world exhales.
Fletch lingers in the doorway for a moment, just long enough for the grief in his eyes to punch me straight in the sternum. “I’m gonna let them know you’re awake,” he says, voice thick. “They’ve been waiting.”
And then he’s gone.
Seconds later, the door flies open like a gust of heartbreak.
Reese.
Her face is blotchy, eyes ringed with dark moons of sleeplessness, makeup long since cried away. And when she sees me—really sees me—she breaks. Her knees hit the edge of the bed like she’s trying to climb into the past and rewrite it, and her arms are around me before I even think to lift mine.
I cry. Of course I cry. Because her grief tastes like mine. Because I didn’t realize how lost I was until she said my name and made me remember I’m still here.
“I thought I lost you,” she whispers into my hair. “I thought we all lost you.”
“I missed everything,” I manage, my voice paper thin.
“No.” She pulls back just far enough to look at me, her thumb swiping beneath my eye. “You made it back. That’s what matters.”
There’s so much I want to ask. About the boys. About the band. About whether any of this is real and not some cruel extension of whatever dream I was trapped in.
But before I can untangle any of it, she’s kissing my forehead and telling me she’ll be right outside. That the others are coming. That my dad is next.
The door swings open again, and my father steps inside.
His face is older. Wetter. Like he’s aged and softened in ways I never thought possible.
“Hey, mija .”
“Hi,” I whisper. “You look like crap.”
He laughs. Chokes on it. “You’ve got my genes, so buckle up.”
He pulls a chair closer, takes my hand—his thumb brushing over my knuckles like he’s praying to a god neither of us believes in.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Kingston…” I hesitate. “He was there. In the dream. With me. For all of it.”
He freezes.
And I know before he says it. I know.
He squeezes my hand tighter. “Sweetheart…”
“No,” I breathe. “Don’t.”
“I’m so sorry, Mya. He died your senior year. Car accident. You were there.”
My lungs seize. The walls tilt. My world—the one I thought I lived in, the one I built with him—splinters like glass under a hammer.
“No,” I whisper again, this time to myself. To the dream. To whatever cruel trick my brain played on me by letting me love him all over again.
I don’t remember the moment it all came undone.
Only that I’m drowning now in memories that don’t belong here—phantoms of a life I never really lived. A penthouse I never stepped foot in. A man who only ever existed in the corners of my heart and the softest parts of my grief.
Kingston.
God.
It felt so real.
His laugh. His hands. The twins. Our twins because he wanted me and everything that comes with me.
My fingers shake as they press to my belly, as if I can still feel the weight of them inside me. As if I could will the dream back with nothing but muscle memory and desperation.
But all that greets me is absence.
Flat fabric.
The cool touch of a hospital gown that’s never seen love or light or that swaying slow dance we shared in the kitchen at midnight.
Tears fall before I feel them coming, slick and silent, soaking into my pillow like secrets too heavy to hold.
My father’s hand finds mine. He doesn’t speak right away. Just wipes my cheek with the pad of his thumb the way he used to when I had nightmares as a kid. Back when monsters lived in closets, not in the empty spaces I’d built around the people I lost.
“You’re safe now,” he murmurs. “We almost lost you. But you fought like hell to come back.”
My chest rattles with a breath that doesn’t feel earned. “It didn’t feel like a fight,” I rasp. “It felt like… falling.”
He nods, his throat bobbing. “The whole family’s in the waiting room. They’ve been here every day. Reese hasn’t left. Not once.”
That cracks something inside me. I squeeze his hand, like it might tether me to this world where Kingston doesn’t exist but they do. The ones who waited. The ones who stayed.
“Dad?” My voice is smaller than I want it to be. Like a child’s. “Can you… can you get Fletch?”
His mouth lifts at the corner. But his eyes… God, his eyes say everything I don’t have the strength to.
“Yeah,” he says, standing slowly. “Yeah, sweetheart. I’ll get him.”
He leans down, presses a kiss to my temple, and when he pulls back, there’s a flicker in his expression. A fracture of something that feels like mourning. For what I dreamed. For what I lost.
And maybe—for what I had to remember just to come back.
Then he’s gone, the door clicking softly behind him like the end of a chapter I wasn’t ready to finish.
I stare up at the ceiling, the beeping machines my only audience.
Somewhere out there, the world kept spinning.
Somewhere, my sons are alive.
And somewhere in this room…
I’m still trying to piece myself back together.
* * *
Fletch wheels me into the NICU slowly, as if he’s afraid I’ll break again, shatter into glass right here under the fluorescent lights. But I’m already broken. Cracked clean down the middle. The glue holding me together right now is hope—hope and the sound of two tiny heartbeats I’ve never heard but somehow already know.
My chest aches as we stop at the first incubator. It’s smaller than I thought it would be. Fragile, like a snow globe, only instead of glitter, it holds the most perfect, terrifying little miracle I’ve ever seen.
He’s so small. His skin almost translucent, his face furrowed in something that looks like determined sleep. A fighter. A warrior. A dream born from something real and something imagined.
My hand trembles where it rests on the edge of the glass. “Is he…?”
“Breathing on his own,” Fletch says, voice gruff. “They both are. Little lungs are working overtime.”
He gestures to the next incubator, and my heart expands, then clenches again. The second baby is curled tighter, cheeks pinker. His hand flutters against the thin cotton covering his chest, like he’s reaching for something even in sleep.
“I didn’t name them,” Fletch says quietly, almost apologetic. “I didn’t want to—couldn’t—without you. Felt wrong.”
I don’t know where the name comes from. Maybe the dream. Maybe the ache still curling behind my ribs. But the word drops out of me before I can stop it.
“Kingston,” I whisper, staring at the first boy. “His name is Kingston.”
Fletch’s breath catches. And then he nods, jaw tight, emotion rolling off him in waves. “Yeah,” he rasps. “That’s good. That’s… perfect.”
We both stare for a long moment. Like if we stop looking, stop breathing them in, they’ll disappear.
Fletch kneels beside me, hand warm over mine, grounding me to the moment. “What about the second one?” he asks.
I turn to him, not trusting my voice. There’s something so raw in his face. So unguarded. Like he’s been waiting for this moment just as long as I have.
“You name him,” I say, eyes locked to his. “He’s yours too.”
Fletch glances at the second incubator. Swallows hard. Then smiles—a soft, unsteady thing that tugs at everything inside me.
“Kody,” he says, his voice thick. “Kingston and Kody.”
And just like that, they’re no longer two tiny strangers in plastic cradles. They’re ours. Named. Real. Loved.
Tears sting my eyes again, but this time they don’t fall from grief. They fall because for the first time in what feels like forever… I’m not dreaming.
I’m awake. And they’re mine.
The nurse moves with the kind of calm that only comes from years of doing the impossible. Her voice is soft, like a lullaby wrapped in reassurance. “They’re stable enough to be held today. One at a time. Skin-to-skin, if you’d like.”
If I’d like?
I’m already nodding, my throat too tight to speak.
Fletch helps me out of the wheelchair, hands steady as they guide me to the recliner nestled beside Kingston’s incubator. My legs are trembling. My heart’s thundering. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of something sacred, like the second I touch him, I’ll cross over into a place I’ll never want to leave.
The nurse carefully lifts Kingston from the warmth of the incubator and places him against my chest, tucking a warm blanket over us both.
He’s so small.
So light I swear I’m imagining him.
But he’s real.
He smells like sterile cotton and something sweet—something new. His cheek rests against my skin, and when I feel the tiniest flutter of breath against my collarbone, my entire soul caves in on itself.
Tears come instantly.
No warning. No permission.
Just floodgates bursting wide open as I curl my hand protectively around his fragile back, terrified to move, terrified not to.
“Hi,” I whisper, my lips brushing the soft down on his head. “Hi, baby boy. I’m your mom.”
The words feel foreign and familiar all at once, like trying on a name I was born to wear but forgot how to say.
I look up and Fletch is already crying. Silently, like he can’t bear to make a sound and risk breaking the moment. His hands are fists at his sides, and when our eyes meet, I swear the world stops spinning for just a second.
“I missed everything,” I choke out.
He kneels beside me, his hand resting on my knee. “No, you didn’t. This… this is the beginning.”
We stay like that, wrapped in warmth and wonder, until the nurse returns and gently lifts Kingston from my chest. I almost beg her not to take him. To let me keep him pressed against my heart a little longer.
But then she places Kody in my arms.
And I forget how to breathe all over again.
Where Kingston is delicate and still, Kody is fire and motion. His fingers curl against my skin, his legs twitching like he’s ready to take on the world. He snuffles once, then settles against me like he knows me. Like he remembers me.
I kiss the crown of his head, my tears slipping into his hair. “Hi, Kody,” I whisper. “You made it.”
Fletch crouches again, one hand brushing over Kody’s back. “They both did.”
I nod, the ache in my chest twisting into something softer. Something whole.
I don’t know how long we sit there. Minutes. Hours. Maybe forever.
But for the first time since I opened my eyes in that hospital bed…
I don’t feel like I’m waking up from a dream.
I feel like I’ve finally stepped into the life I was always meant to have.
* * *
The hallway outside the NICU is quiet.
Too quiet.
Like the world knows we just touched something holy and it’s giving us space to breathe again.
Fletch wheels me back to my room in silence, his hand resting on my shoulder like a tether—steady, grounding. We pass two nurses talking in hushed tones and a janitor mopping up a spill near the vending machine, but no one looks at us. No one dares break the spell.
Not yet.
When we get to the room, he helps me into bed like it’s the most natural thing in the world—like he’s been doing it for years. Like this is our normal. And maybe it could be, if I let it.
If I’m brave enough.
He pulls the blanket up to my waist and hands me a cup of ice chips like I didn’t just hold our children against my chest for the first time. Like he hasn’t watched me shatter and come back together a hundred times in the span of an hour.
I take a chip between my fingers, press it to my lips, and close my eyes as it melts on my tongue. Cold and clean. A reset.
“I didn’t think I’d ever get to see that,” Fletch says softly, lowering himself into the chair beside the bed. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, like the weight of everything he’s been carrying has finally settled in his bones.
“See what?” My voice is raspy but steady.
“You. Holding them. Saying their names.” He pauses. “Coming back.”
I watch him for a beat. Watch the way his jaw tightens, the way he doesn’t look at me right away. His fingers twist together in his lap.
“I didn’t know if you would,” he admits, eyes still fixed on some invisible point on the floor. “I’d sit here for hours. Days. Talking to you. Telling you about the twins, about Reese, about how Carson won’t stop stress baking and Penelope’s been threatening to kill Alex over tour dates—anything, just to fill the silence.”
He finally looks at me.
And it wrecks me.
Because this version of Fletch—quiet, vulnerable, cracked open and still standing—he’s not the boy I left behind.
He’s the man who stayed.
“I thought I lost everything,” I whisper. “I thought… when I woke up and the dream was gone, that there wouldn’t be anything left.”
He exhales hard. “There is.”
“I know.”
A pause.
Then, softer, “You stayed.”
“I never had a choice,” he says, voice rough. “I wanted to stay, Mya. I wanted to be here the moment you woke up so I could tell you—” He breaks off, dragging a hand through his hair. “Shit. I don’t even know where to start.”
I reach out, threading my fingers through his. “Then don’t start at the beginning. Start here.”
His eyes search mine. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
And there it is—his smile. Crooked and boyish and weighted with months of worry and sleepless nights. He brings our joined hands to his lips, kissing my knuckles like he’s afraid they’ll disappear.
“I love you,” he says, like it’s the easiest thing he’s ever done. “I never stopped. Even when I didn’t know how to fix it, even when I was scared shitless. I never stopped.”
The tears come before I can stop them, slipping down my cheeks like punctuation.
“I dreamed a whole world where I was loved like that,” I whisper. “And then I woke up and realized I already had it.”
He leans in, pressing his forehead to mine.
And for the first time in three months, maybe longer, I feel like I’m not just breathing…
I’m alive.