Chapter 36
Khalee
“Kaze, ” I murmur, barely breathing. His name falls from my lips because I’m still shocked that he’s here. He’s alive.
I start moving toward the bed, pulled by something stronger than thought. My legs feel numb, trembling under me, but I keep walking because even if I wanted, I couldn’t stop.
Voices rise around me, urgent, sharp. Doctors are telling me I can’t be here, asking me to step back. But their words don’t reach me. They sound muffled, distant. I see their mouths moving, their hands reaching out, but it’s like they’re in another room.
I keep going.
One step. Then another.
All I can see is him.
Then a hand grabs my arm, trying to pull me back. I gasp and fight it, twisting away, crying out his name again. Panic rises in my chest, wild and bright, spilling from my throat like fire.
The woman who was previously next to his bed, part of the couple I noticed, steps forward suddenly, placing herself between me and everyone else. She doesn’t touch me. Just looks, sadness, and curiosity cutting me just by seeing her. Her voice cuts through the noise.
“Wait, ” she says. Calm, but firm. “Everyone, stop. Stop, please.” Her gaze was still on me, sharp and searching. “Who are you?”
I can’t answer. I can barely breathe. But then I look at her, really look at her, and I know.
Her eyes are green. That same transparent, stormy green I’ve seen in dreams and memories for a long time. Years because they’re the same ones the man I love has.
She’s his mother.
And the man beside her, the blond hair, the sharp jaw, the way he holds himself like the world owes him nothing but respect, is like Kaze, but older and worn. He’s his father.
My knees almost gave out.
“I…” My voice breaks. “I know him. I’ve known him for a long time. I, ” The words rush out, choked and messy. “I love him. I’ve seen him. I’ve felt him. I didn’t know he was alive, but he is, and I don’t know how to explain it, but I love him. I love him.”
Tears stream down my face. My chest is tight, my hands shaking. Everyone around me stares like I’ve lost my mind.
And maybe I have.
Voices keep trying to reach me, and anxiety tightens around my chest like a vice. It climbs through my throat, threatening to suffocate me. The room tilts, sharp and loud, and I’m on the verge of unraveling.
A scent finds me.
Warm, soft, familiar. Lavender and something deeper, older. The kind of smell that pulls you back into yourself when you’re slipping away.
My mother.
I turn my head, and she’s already there. Standing just inside the room. Her eyes go from me to the bed, and the moment she sees him, her expression shatters.
She knows.
Not because I told her. Not because anyone had to explain. She just sees him, sees us, and something inside her recognizes the truth.
“He’s him, ” I whisper. “Mom, he’s Kaze.”
She looks at me, then at him, and for a moment, something ancient and terrified flickers across her face. She presses her lips together, and when she speaks, her voice trembles.
“I’m so sorry, ” she says. “Khalee… I’m so sorry. I didn’t think, I didn’t believe, ”
But I don’t need her to finish. Because I already know.
She sees it too. He’s not a fragment of my imagination. He’s not a ghost.
“What do you mean, dear?”
The woman in front of me, Kaze’s mother, turns toward us. Her voice trembles with tears she hasn’t fully let fall. Her eyes search mine, desperate, not for answers, but for something solid to hold onto.
Before I can even begin to form words, my mother speaks.
“My daughter, ” she says, voice unsteady, “she and your son… they have history.”
“They do?” the man, his father, asks. His tone holds disbelief, but it’s the kind laced with hope. The kind that’s been quiet for too long and isn’t sure it’s allowed to rise again.
“We do, ” I say, my voice cracking under the weight of everything I’m holding in. “We always did.”
He stares at me for a moment. Then slowly, with trembling hands, he reaches inside his coat, pulling out a black notebook worn at the edges, creased, but familiar in a way that makes my heart twist.
“We had to read it, ” he says, his voice rough and thin. “We waited, we hoped he would come back before we had to do it, but… when the waiting got too heavy, we needed something to hold on to. So we read it. Not all of it. But enough.”
He glances at his wife, and then back at me.
“Sometimes we sang to him some of the songs in there, the ones written in here. We thought that maybe it would remind him of us. Maybe it would bring him back, somehow.”
He holds the notebook out to me, hands shaking. I move forward and take it gently, fingers curling around the cover like it might disappear if I’m not careful.
“There are entries, ” he continues, “where he writes about ‘his light.’ And in a few… he mentions someone. K.’”
I can’t speak. My throat closes, and tears run down my cheeks. All I can do is hold the notebook, feel the imprint of his words beneath my palms.
His mother steps closer now, her voice breaking as she tries to fill in the spaces her husband left behind.
“We never found his phone after the crash. Everything else burned. There was nothing left to trace back to anyone, no names, no numbers. Just… this piece of him.”
Her voice falters. She wraps her arms around herself like she’s trying to hold everything in, bracing against a truth too heavy to carry.
“We tried, ” she says, quieter now. “We tried to find you. We didn’t even know your name. But we hoped. We hoped you’d appear somehow. That maybe, if you spoke to him… If he heard your voice… he’d find his way back to us.”
Her voice breaks at the end. Not gently, completely. The last word is pulled out of her like it hurts to let it go.
“But we never managed to, ” she whispers, almost ashamed of the failure.
“I thought he had left me.” My voice comes out thin, like a thread unraveling. “I… only found out recently. All this time… I thought he was dead.”
She doesn’t speak. She just steps forward and pulls me into her arms, and suddenly we’re clinging to each other, two women who love the same boy in different ways, both broken, both grieving, both holding onto what’s left.
She cries with me. Not softly, not politely, but with the same desperation that’s been living inside me for years. For a moment, there are no questions. No explanations. Just grief and love, tangled and raw.
Time folds in on itself. Minutes stretch into something slower, heavier. And when the weight of our pain begins to settle, when we’re finally able to breathe again, I lift my head.
I wipe my face, take one trembling step forward, then another.
And I move toward the heartbeat that lives outside of my chest.
The fog in my mind starts to lift, slowly, like morning light pushing through heavy storm clouds. My breath steadies just enough to hold me upright, and I look at him.
Peaceful. Beautiful.
Now, older, his features sharper and more defined, yet still unmistakably him. Still, the boy I never stopped loving—still mine.
Behind me, my mother’s voice breaks the silence.
“What now?” she asks, her tone barely above a breath.
There’s a pause. Then his father speaks, his voice brittle and low.
“We… were saying goodbye.”
The words crash into me, sharp and wrong. My heart stumbles in my chest.
“What?” I ask, my voice rising in panic.
His father doesn’t meet my eyes. His gaze stays locked on the motionless body of his son. On the shape of a life suspended.
“We can’t keep him like this anymore, ” he says. “The doctors have done everything they could. But it’s been five years. Five years with no change. No response. No sign of him. It’s not fair.”
I feel the ground tilt beneath me, and the air sucked out of my lungs.
“It’s not fair to him, ” he goes on. “He wouldn’t want this. He wouldn’t want to be kept here like this, just barely existing.”
“No. No.” The words leave me in a ragged breath, sharp and sudden. “You can’t do this.”
“Sweetheart…” my mom says softly, reaching for me.
I pull away from her hand like it burns.
“No, Mom. Don’t. You don’t get it.”
I turn back to the bed, to the machines, to the now man who should’ve been a ghost but isn’t. To the heartbeat I’d know anywhere.
“I just found him, ” I cry. “I just got him back. He’s here. I can feel it. He’s coming back. He promised.”
My knees nearly give out, but I force myself to stay upright. I press my palms to the edge of the bed, grounding myself against something real, something that still holds him tethered to this world.
“He promised, ” I whisper again, my voice breaking at the edges. “He promised me.”
I say it once, then again, then again. As if saying it enough times could bring him back.
Tears blur everything: the room, the people, the light. I lower my head and rest my forehead against the back of his hand. It’s warm. It’s him. Still here, somehow.
“I waited for you, ” I breathe. “Please. Don’t leave me now. Don’t make me lose you twice.”
The only sound is the steady rhythm of the machines, mechanical and indifferent: that, and our crying. Every noise feels unbearable, too loud, too final.
No one speaks. No one dares move.
“You promised, baby, ” I repeat, over and over, a mantra carved from grief. “You promised not to leave me. Never again.”
The pain in my chest is so deep, so sharp, I’m almost sure that when his heart stops beating, so will mine.
I don’t notice when we’re left alone.
I don’t see people stepping away, and I don’t hear the door close. I only feel the shift, the sudden quiet. Somehow, they knew. Somehow, they understood we needed this.
On autopilot, I climb gently into the bed, beside him.
My body curls next to his because it remembers how to fit there.
It’s instinct, not thought. Like my soul was just waiting for permission to return to where it belongs, so I nestle into the stillness, my fingers brushing his, and I wait for him.
For a sign. For the universe to give him back to me.
Because I know he’s coming back. He has to.
Because love should be enough.
And before I know it, I’m falling asleep. Not in peace, but in hope. Not in silence, but in love. Always in love.