Chapter 49
The hospital waiting room had bad coffee, worse chairs, and a television bolted to the wall playing a cooking show with no sound. Gabe had never in his life been so grateful for an ugly room.
Because they were all in it. Alive enough to hate the chairs. All of them except Tom.
He bowed his head, adding yet another prayer to the countless requests they’d all made to their Savior.
Tom was somewhere past a set of double doors with a surgical team and a chance.
Hands on her knees, Reagan sat as close to those doors as a person could get without being through them, hunched forward in borrowed scrubs, watching them like she could hold back bad news by will alone.
Cara had claimed the chair beside her an hour ago and hadn't moved.
The rest of them coped the only ways they knew how, which was to say badly, and out loud.
Owen had not stopped talking since they walked in. Somewhere around the second hour he'd landed on the thesis that what they had just lived through battling Neptune was, structurally, a medieval siege.
"The cabin is a keeper." He sketched a castle in the air with both hands.
"Water on three sides, one causeway in. That's a motte-and-bailey, completely textbook.
Cartwright had superior numbers and firepower, but she made the besieger's oldest mistake, which is that she came inside the walls.
The moment she did that, she surrendered the advantage.
Cara, what you ran was essentially a feigned parley. There are accounts of this at Antioch—"
"Owen." Wade didn't open his eyes. "Buddy. Nobody at Antioch had a float plane. Or a cottonmouth."
"That is true," Owen said, delighted, and began a new paragraph.
Skye had been stitched up hours back, a row of staples in her side and an order to rest she'd received the way she received most orders, as a fine idea for other people. At the moment she was upside down against the far wall.
"You're going to pop every one of those," Reagan said, without turning around.
"They're excellent staples." Skye held the headstand a beat longer, came down easy, and returned to the meal she'd built out of three vending machines: a sleeve of crackers, a chocolate milk, and a bag of dill-pickle sunflower seeds she was eating one at a time, with the focus of a woman defusing a device.
"Adrenaline crash. You burn the sugar or the sugar burns you.
" She held the bag out to Bennion. "Local delicacy. "
Suzette Bennion, who had spent eight months in a swamp and the last day watching these people nearly die on her account, took one. Chewed. Considered. "I've had worse," she allowed.
Gabe watched it all from the doorway, a paper cup going cold in his hand, and understood that he was looking at the thing itself.
Not the case. Not Cartwright. This. A room full of people too wired to sit and too grateful to leave, building jokes out of the worst night of their lives because the only other option was to feel the whole of it at once.
Eighteen months ago he'd had a badge, a desk, and a clean idea of his life’s purpose.
He'd traded all of it for this. No authority, no backup he hadn't talked into the room himself, a found family that ran on caffeine and sugar and prayer and would, every one of them, have died on that dock tonight and not asked why first.
No way he’d trade this new life for anything. The certainty sat in him quiet and settled.
"Somebody has to call Diane," Cara announced. "And Piper."
Nobody jumped at it.
"And tell her what?" Wade’s voice was gentle, for Wade. "He's in surgery and we don't know yet? That's not a phone call. That's a heart attack from three thousand miles away."
"Diane’ll know something's wrong." Cara turned her phone over in her hands. "She always knows. And Piper." She stopped, lower lip trembling. “We can’t just––“
"We need to wait until we can tell them something concrete."
There was no flight and no road that put either of them in this room before the night was decided one way or the other, and all a call now would do was hand two people he loved a terror they could do nothing with. "The second we know, we call. Not before."
Cara looked at him a moment, then nodded, and set the phone face-down on her knee, where she could feel it.
They didn't have to wait long.
The doors swung open. A surgeon in tired scrubs came out asking for the family of Thomas, and stopped, recalculating visibly, at how many people stood up at once.
"He's going to make it." She lifted a hand against the noise before it could start. "He lost a great deal of blood, and he is not going to enjoy the next few weeks. But he's stubborn, and he's stable. He’s going to make it."
Reagan didn't make a sound. She just crumpled, all at once, the way a held breath finally lets go, and put her face in her hands. Cara wrapped an arm around her, and for a little while the toughest woman Gabe knew let herself not be.
Cara picked up her phone, catching his eye as she swept out into the corridor. “I got this.”
Reagan was past words and somebody had to be the steady voice on the far end of the line.
Gabe watched her from the doorway. Watched her say Diane's name. Watched whatever Diane said back land soft on her face, and watched her give her friend, and Tom’s daughter, the one sentence that mattered, he's going to make it, and then stand a while just listening, nodding, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand.
He could fill in the other side without hearing a word of it.
Diane steady as a banked fire even now, telling Cara to bring the whole bruised lot of them home, saying she'd have the lights on. And she’d take care of Piper until they arrived.
At some point Cara said, "Hang on. She's right here," and carried the phone back inside to Skye.
Skye took it like it might go off.
Gabe watched the most self-contained person he had ever known stand in a hospital corridor and let a teenager three thousand miles away love her out loud, not deflecting it, not running from the room, just shutting her eyes and taking it, because she had very nearly not lived to.
When she handed the phone back, her eyes were wet.
She didn't bother to hide it, which was its own kind of first.
Later, after the surgeon, after the room had loosened, after Skye had installed herself in a chair by the recovery-ward door to stand a watch nobody had assigned her, Gabe found Cara at the windows at the end of the hall, looking out at a parking lot going gold in the waning light.
He'd been needing to say this since this whole mission got crazy. Maybe since Norway. He was done carrying it.
He straightened behind her, ready for whatever response he got. "I'm not going to do the thing I always do.”
She didn't turn. "Which thing?"
"The one where you say you can’t promise tomorrow, and I let that be.
" He inched closer, until he could feel her body heat fill the inches between them.
"I've been letting this slide. Letting us slide.
Well. It's over. The thing we kept saying we'd wait for came, and we nearly didn't walk back out of it.
I'm done waiting for a safer time to want what I want. "
Now she looked at him.
He swallowed hard, forcing himself to continue. Whatever her answer, things between them would change now. He needed to take this chance.
He stared into her dark eyes. "I want the after.
Now. Not someday. I want the bakery and the cat and the whole ordinary impossible thing.
I want to marry you, Cara. I'm not asking you tonight.
You've had enough people pointing things at you for one night.
I'm telling you. Just so it's said. So it's in the room. "
Cara was quiet a long moment. He'd half braced for the deflection, the joke that put three careful feet between them. It didn't come.
"You don’t know the details, but you know what I am," she said at last. "I run.
It's the one thing I've ever been good at.
I've spent my whole life making sure there was nothing in any room I couldn't walk straight out of.
" Her voice wasn't level. "And tonight I walked into a cabin full of guns because the people I couldn't leave were inside it.
" She stopped, and started again, smaller, truer.
"I think you've gone and broken the only skill I had. "
"Is that a yes?"
"It's not a no." She turned back to the glass, but she took his hand, and held it, and didn't let go. "It's an ask-me-again-when-I-can-think-straight. It's an I-want-it-too, and that scares me worse than Cartwright did." A breath. "It's the most honest thing I have tonight. Take it."
He took it. From her, he understood, it was the whole world.