Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
FLETCH
T he second I help her back into bed, I want to fall apart.
Not in the loud, explosive way. Not fists through drywall or screaming into pillows. This kind of falling apart is quieter. Bone-deep. The kind that doesn’t come with warning signs or soundtracks. Just the slow, splintering realization that something inside you cracked a long time ago—and you never noticed until now.
Her skin’s still too pale. Her hands still shake when she tries to move. But her eyes? God, her eyes are awake. Haunted, but here. And after three months of waiting, of whispering her name into a silence that almost swallowed me whole, I finally get to look into them again.
She settles into the pillows, wincing as the movement pulls against everything still healing inside her. I tug the blanket up, careful. Reverent. Like she’s glass. Like she might vanish again if I breathe wrong.
“Hey,” I say, voice low, raw from disuse and every word I never got to say.
“Hey.” She offers me a shadow of a smile, but it doesn’t reach the grief pooling behind her lashes.
I sit on the edge of the bed and force myself to meet her gaze. “What do you remember?”
She doesn’t answer right away. Just stares at a fixed point on the wall like she’s trying to sew her thoughts together with invisible thread.
“I remember leaving,” she says finally, voice barely a whisper. “I called an Uber. I didn’t say goodbye.”
Her throat works like it hurts to swallow. Like this is her confession and punishment in one.
“I felt like I was making everything worse,” she adds. “You were spiraling. And I thought maybe if I left, you’d stop crashing into yourself.”
I exhale, but it’s not relief. It’s regret. Bitter and biting and laced with the kind of guilt that keeps you awake every damn night.
“You didn’t make me crash, Mya,” I say quietly. “I was already in pieces. You just saw the fallout.”
She closes her eyes. And when she opens them again, she looks older. Worn. Like grief aged her in fast-forward.
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” she says.
“I know.” And I do. I’ve had three months to sit in that silence. To replay every word we left unsaid. Every fuck-up. Every fall.
She turns her head slightly, eyes finding mine. “The babies…”
“Born at twenty-seven weeks,” I murmur, and my voice breaks even as I try to keep it steady. “Emergency c-section. Placental abruption. They were both in distress, and it was either get them out or lose all three of you.”
Her hand twitches against the blanket, and I cover it with mine.
“They were so small, Mya.” I swallow hard. “They didn’t even cry when they came out. Just… silence. Like the world was holding its breath, waiting to see if they’d make it.”
Her lips part. No sound comes out.
“The doctors weren’t sure if they’d survive the first night. But I was.” I meet her gaze, firm. “I had to be. They’re fighters. Just like their mom.”
Her eyes well up, and I reach for a tissue without even thinking. Like it’s muscle memory by now. Because this is what I’ve been doing for three months—holding onto hope with bleeding hands and pretending I wasn’t afraid every second she didn’t wake up.
“I’ve been here,” I say, voice shaking. “Every single day. I talked to you. Played music. Told you stories I made up just so you’d have something to dream about.”
“I thought I dreamed you,” she whispers, tears slipping down her cheeks. “I thought… Kingston was real. That we had a life in New York.”
“Who’s Kingston?” I ask.
The words are out before I can pull them back, but it’s too late to pretend I didn’t hear it. Didn’t catch the tremble in her dad’s voice when he said he died your senior year.
Mya freezes.
Like I reached out and touched a part of her she’s kept buried so deep it’s fossilized.
Her gaze cuts away from mine, drifting to the window where dusk has started bleeding orange across the glass. She doesn’t speak for a long time. I don’t rush her.
When she does, it’s not just her voice that’s quiet—it’s her soul.
“He was my high school sweetheart,” she says finally. “We met sophomore year. Fell hard. The kind of stupid, loud, all-consuming kind of love that you think is going to last forever because no one’s ever told you otherwise.”
I don’t move.
Don’t blink.
Just let her keep going.
“We were planning to leave after graduation. He had this whole dream—New York, football, a tiny apartment with a fire escape even though he could afford something bigger.”
A beat. Then her mouth curves, but it’s not a smile. It’s a scar in disguise.
“He died in a car accident two weeks before prom. A drunk driver ran a red light. His mom called me before the cops did.”
Her hand curls in the blanket like she’s trying to anchor herself to something solid.
“I don’t talk about him,” she adds, voice hollow now. “I couldn’t. Not even in therapy. I locked it all away. Packed it up like a box I shoved into the back of a closet and pretended didn’t exist.”
She turns back to me, eyes glassy but unwavering. “And then I slipped into a coma… and woke up in a life where he didn’t die.”
The air leaves my lungs like a punch to the gut. But I stay quiet.
Because this is sacred ground.
“I was living with him in a penthouse in Manhattan. Pregnant. Happy. It felt so real, Fletch. I could feel the babies kicking. I could smell him on my clothes. Hear his guitar through the walls. And you weren’t there.”
She looks down, and the breath she takes is jagged. “You didn’t exist. At least not in the way you do now.”
My throat tightens. “How long?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers. “Time didn’t move right. But it felt like years.”
I press a fist to my sternum, trying to ease the ache blooming there like wildfire.
“And when I woke up… it broke me. Because I loved him. And I lost him again.”
She bites down hard on her bottom lip. “That’s why I named the baby Kingston. Not because I wish it was real. But because it was. In there. And now it’s gone.”
A beat of silence swells between us. And then?—
“But I came back to you,” she adds, voice breaking. “When everything started to unravel in the dream, it wasn’t him I saw. It was you.”
My eyes sting. I don’t look away.
“You were the tether. The voice that kept calling me home.”
I reach for her hand. Hold it like it’s glass and wildfire all at once.
“I’m not angry,” I say, barely more than a breath. “How could I be? He was your first love. That kind of grief doesn’t come with an expiration date.”
Her fingers tighten around mine.
“But I’m here now,” I tell her. “And so are they. Our sons. Your past doesn’t scare me, Mya. Not if you’re willing to let me be part of what comes next.”
Her eyes brim over.
Not with sadness this time.
With something softer. Lighter. The kind of ache that might someday become peace.
“I want that,” she says, voice cracking. “I want to stop living in ghosts.”
I lift her hand to my mouth. Kiss her knuckles. One by one.
“Then we start here,” I whisper. “With Kingston. With Kody. With us.”
And in the quiet that follows, she lets out a breath she’s been holding since she was seventeen.
Maybe we both do.
* * *
The hoodie swamps her frame.
My hoodie.
It hangs off her like grief in fabric form—oversized, threadbare, stubbornly clinging to what’s left of me. Of us. But she wears it like armor, and maybe that’s what kills me most. That I’ve become her armor after everything I’ve put her through.
The hallway is long. Too long. A sterile tunnel with scuffed floors and flickering fluorescents that buzz like they know I’m one wrong breath from falling apart. Mya grips the railing, her knuckles pale, steps slow, each one a tiny rebellion against everything that tried to take her from me.
“I can walk,” she says, and it comes out defiant even though her knees say otherwise.
“Not without making me nervous,” I murmur, close but not hovering, hand out but not touching—unless she needs me. God, I’m always two seconds away from needing her to need me.
It’s been two weeks since she woke up.
Fourteen days since her lashes fluttered like broken wings and her voice cracked open the silence that lived in my bones.
A hundred and forty thousand minutes since I started counting again.
She’s here. She’s breathing. And today, they’re letting her leave.
But the boys aren’t. Kingston and Kody are staying behind. The NICU still needs them, still holds them in its gentle, humming womb of warmth and machines and white noise lullabies. They’re stronger now—fighters like their mom—but not ready to come home. Not yet.
Mya hasn’t said it out loud, but I know the guilt is clawing at her ribcage. I see it in the way she looks back at the NICU every ten steps, like she’s tethered to them by invisible thread.
I hate this.
I hate that I can’t fix it.
But I hold the discharge papers in one hand and her elbow in the other, and when we finally make it outside, the air slaps us with cold, damp clarity. The clouds hang low and gray, like they’re waiting for someone to shatter.
She lowers into the wheelchair like it’s a throne she didn’t ask for. Her exhale is long and tired, like it’s dragging the weight of the world behind it. I kneel to buckle the strap over her lap and look up—because I have to see her eyes. I need to.
“You ready?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. “To go home?”
Her gaze lifts. Meets mine.
And I swear, it cracks me clean open.
“Yeah,” she breathes. “I’m ready.”
But it’s not just about home. It’s not the walls or the bed or the way the sheets still smell like lemon detergent and second chances. It’s about them. The tiny boys we left sleeping under lights and wires. The ones we named together like we were anchoring them to this world.
Kingston.
Kody.
My sons.
God.
I push her gently toward the car like she’s porcelain and I’m afraid of breaking what’s already so fucking fragile. I open the door, help her in, adjust the seatbelt twice just to keep my hands busy. Then I slide behind the wheel and sit there for a second, watching her tuck her knees up like she’s trying to make herself smaller.
Like she thinks there’s no space for her in this new life.
“You okay?” I ask.
She nods, but she doesn’t look at me.
And for a beat, neither of us speaks.
The hospital fades in the rearview mirror as I pull away, but the weight of it? It doesn’t. It clings to us, sticky and electric.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see this day,” I admit. “Not like this. Not with you awake.”
She finally turns, and her face is all soft lines and storm clouds. “Me neither.”
I grip the wheel harder than I need to. “The day they told me you might not wake up… I couldn’t breathe, Mya. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I just sat there. And I told myself if you opened your eyes, if you came back to me, I’d do everything differently.”
“You have,” she whispers.
I glance over. Her head’s tipped against the window, eyes heavy-lidded.
“You stayed,” she adds.
“I never left,” I say, voice low and wrecked.
She nods like she already knows that. Like somewhere in the dark corners of her coma, she felt it.
The rest of the ride is quiet.
But not empty.
It’s full of the things we’re too tired to say and too scared to hope.
By the time we reach the house, she’s half-asleep, curled in my hoodie like she’s trying to vanish into something familiar. I park in front of the wraparound porch and cut the engine, then slip out quietly. The gravel crunches underfoot as I circle to her side, help her out of the truck, and carry her bag up the steps of the house Ryan built—solid, warm, and just a short walk from where Reese and Thorin live now.
The air inside smells like lavender and lemon and the ghost of everything we lost and found again.
“I washed the sheets,” I say like it matters.
She doesn’t answer.
She just moves slowly toward the couch, sits like she’s trying not to sink through the floor, and stares at the photo I framed of the boys in the NICU. One in each arm. My hands barely able to hold how small they are.
“We’ll visit them first thing,” I say.
“I know.” Her smile is paper-thin. “I already miss them.”
“They’ll be home soon.” I say it like a promise. Because it is.
She nods again.
And then, when I least expect it, she reaches for my hand and threads her fingers through mine. Like she’s anchoring herself here.
It floors me.
Not because she’s never touched me like this before—she has. In other lifetimes, in other versions of us. But because this version? This fragile, trembling one in my hoodie with her eyes heavy and her body hollowed out by grief and grit and everything in between—this version of her needs something real to hold on to.
And somehow, she chose me.
“I started turning one of the spare rooms into a nursery,” I tell her quietly. “Back when you were still asleep.”
Her head tilts toward me, lashes sweeping low like the words weigh more than she expected. “You did?”
“Yeah,” I say, voice rough. “Painted one wall. Ordered some stuff. Crib. Changing table. But then I stopped. Couldn’t bring myself to keep going without you. It felt…wrong. Like I was building a life you weren’t coming back to.”
Her fingers squeeze mine. Just once. But it’s enough to make the ache in my chest crack wider.
She’s quiet for a long moment. Then she looks at me—really looks at me. And I know the second she steps out of this moment and back into the dream. Into the world she built while her body was fighting to stay here.
“I remember the nursery,” she whispers, her voice barely louder than breath. “From the dream.”
I nod slowly, unsure if I’m supposed to say something, or just listen.
“Warm olive-green walls,” she says, eyes distant, like she’s pulling the memory out thread by thread. “Not minty or neon. Just…calm. Like a forest in spring.”
She swallows hard.
“There were these little decals in the corners—foxes and deer and wide-eyed owls. Like a whole woodland crew just waiting to meet the boys. And the cribs—two of them. Cherrywood. Deep, dark, heavy like they’d been carved from old trees with history in their bones. They sat under this wide bay window, side by side like teammates in a tiny war.”
My heart kicks hard behind my ribs. Because I see it now. Her dream. Her version. Her piece of forever that was never just a fantasy.
“And between them,” she adds, blinking fast like it’ll stop the tears, “was a matching dresser. Changing table, actually. Looked like a referee between two mini tornadoes. And I remember thinking… that it was perfect. Not fancy. Not complicated. Just perfect.”
I swallow the lump rising in my throat.
“Then that’s what we’ll build,” I say, and my voice sounds like it’s been dragged over gravel. “Exactly that.”
She looks up at me, like maybe she didn’t expect me to say yes. Not so easily. Not so fast.
But how could I not?
If she dreamed a world where she was safe and they were ours, I’m gonna do everything I can to make sure the real one lives up to it. Even if it breaks me in the process.
“Okay,” she breathes, and it’s not just a word—it’s a promise. A beginning. A thread between then and now.
And when I lean over and press my lips to the top of her head, I swear I can feel something settle. Like we’re finally standing on solid ground.
Together.