4
Lila
The adrenaline had burned away and left me hollow before I finally made it upstairs to the ICU.
That was the worst part of nights like this.
The rush ended. The blood was cleaned from the floor.
The terrible, suspended moments when everything balanced on whether a body would answer what medicine demanded of it gave way to quieter work, and my mind, no longer trapped inside triage, muscle memory, and whatever came next, began reaching for everything I had shoved aside just to make it through.
The ICU was dimmer than the ER, the overhead lights lowered to something gentler.
The air carried that expensive, overfiltered chill hospitals seemed to think passed for peace.
The sounds were different up here too. Softer.
More intimate. Monitors kept watch in low electronic murmurs while oxygen hissed somewhere nearby and rubber soles whispered along the hall.
I stood outside his room longer than I should have.
Then I went in.
Jackson looked wrong in a hospital bed.
The thought came blunt and useless, but painfully true.
He had always been too alive for stillness.
Even as a boy, he carried a restless energy inside him, some part of him constantly prepared to move before anyone else realized movement was necessary.
He belonged beneath open skies, behind the wheel of his battered truck, or tearing across town with Matty beside him and trouble somewhere ahead.
He had never belonged in a silent room beneath white sheets while machines breathed for him.
Seeing him laid out under the hospital lights, tape against his skin and tubing at his mouth, felt like looking at something the world had no right to touch that way.
Someone had cleaned his face. The blood was gone, which should have made it easier to look at him.
Instead, I could see him too clearly.
Age had changed him. Of course it had. His face was leaner than the one I remembered, harder around the mouth, with faint lines beside his eyes that hadn’t existed when he left.
His hair was shorter now. The years sat in the roughness of his skin and the hard shape his life had carved from him, but Jackson was still there beneath it.
The same dark brows.
The same stubborn jaw.
The same cruel, unfair mouth that had ruined me for every man who tried to kiss me after him.
I stopped beside the bed and crossed my arms over my middle, seeking balance more than comfort. “Well,” I said softly, because the room was too quiet and I couldn’t stand inside it without speaking, “this is a hell of a way to come back.”
He didn’t move.
I hadn’t expected him to. Still, some foolish corner of me had believed my voice might reach him. That if I said his name, if I stood close enough, something inside him would recognize me.
The monitor continued its steady rhythm. The ventilator breathed for him in calm, measured intervals.
I swallowed, looked away from his face, then returned to it because apparently, I had no interest in sparing myself. “You always were stubborn, but this?” My laugh came out thin and brittle. “This feels excessive.”
My fingers closed around the rail beside his bed. Cold metal pressed into my palm. Solid. Real. Something I could hold that wasn’t a memory.
Seventeen years.
They sat between us almost as heavily as the machines.
Seventeen years since Jackson walked out of Wicker Falls and never came back.
Seventeen years since I woke up aching, happy, and certain my life had changed in the best possible way, only to discover I had already become something he could leave behind.
I had carried my anger so long that I stopped noticing how much grief lived beneath it.
Grief was harder to hold with dignity. Anger had sharp edges. It gave my hands something to close around and kept anyone from seeing how badly he had hurt me.
Standing beside him now, with Jackson unconscious and broken, neither emotion fit as neatly as it once had.
“You almost died,” I whispered. “Do you understand how unfair that is?”
The words slipped free before I could stop them. Once they did, the rest followed with frightening ease.
“You don’t get to disappear for seventeen years and come back like this. You don’t get to roll into my trauma bay half-dead and make me…” I bit down on the rest, hard enough to hurt, then shook my head. “God, I hate you for this.”
It wasn’t exactly true.
Maybe it had been once. Maybe I’d wished it was until the lie wore smooth enough to resemble truth, but it didn’t survive this room. I dragged a hand over my face and stared at him through the blur of everything pressing against my ribs.
“I had a whole life by the time you came back,” I said. “I built one. I had to. You left without an explanation, a note, or any warning, and I learned how to live with that.” My fingers tightened around the rail. “I got good at it.”
The room remained still.
Jackson had always been good at silence. Better than me. Better than nearly everyone I knew. He could carry whole storms inside him without allowing more than a flicker to cross his face. When I was young, I mistook that for strength.
Later, I understood it had made him impossible to reach.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
My throat tightened around the words.
I looked down at my hand and found my knuckles pale against the metal. “And I have no idea where to start. Maybe I should hate that too.” I drew a slow breath, but it did little to loosen the pressure in my chest. “Maybe I do.”
His face gave me nothing.
“You should’ve been here,” I whispered. “If you don’t know, that’s on you. It isn’t on me.”
The bitterness came out rougher than I intended, but I refused to take it back. Maybe he couldn’t hear me. Maybe some part of him could, and he hadn’t earned gentleness from me yet.
I couldn’t decide which possibility hurt more.
“You don’t deserve to know.” The words felt thin the instant I said them, stretched over everything I was still afraid to name. “Maybe you don’t.”
My voice broke.
It wasn’t dramatic. Nothing inside the room shattered with it. One ugly crack split the middle of the sentence, enough to betray me, and I pressed my lips together as heat stung behind my eyes.
I stood there breathing carefully through my nose until I trusted myself again.
Then I released the rail, bent over him, and pressed my lips to his cheek, careful of the tape and the tube.
His skin was warm.
That hurt more than it should have.
I straightened, wiped my face with the heel of my hand, and glanced at the monitor long enough to reassure the nurse in me that nothing had changed.
Then I left before I did something humiliating, like tell a comatose man I still loved him.
I sat inside my car in the hospital parking garage and called home.
Jade answered on the third ring, and for one brief, disorienting second, I heard only the ordinary sounds of her life.
A cabinet closing. The television murmuring somewhere in the background.
Paper rustling, probably the color-coded study guides she pretended not to care about and guarded like classified documents.
“Hey, Mom.”
Her voice was easy and distracted in that distinctly teenage way that meant she was doing several things at once and would somehow remember each of them better than I would.
I closed my eyes and rested my head against the seat. “Hey, baby. Sorry I’m running late.”
“You’re always running late.”
There was no heat behind it. Just Jade being Jade, dry as dust and far less inconvenienced than she wanted me to believe.
“I know.” My voice softened without permission. “I’m not coming straight home. I’m going to Aunt Blue’s for a little while. We had kind of a day.”
Silence lingered on the other end. Long enough for her to hear what I hadn’t said, but not long enough for her to pry.
“You okay?”
The quiet concern in those two words came closer to undoing me than anything else had. I swallowed and forced my voice steady. “I’m okay. Just tired.”
“Mmhmm.”
That sound carried precisely the amount of teenage skepticism I expected.
“There’s lasagna in the freezer,” I said, retreating into practical because practical felt safer. “The good one, not the sad low-fat version I bought during my delusional week. Put it in at three-fifty and cover it for the first half so it doesn’t dry out.”
“I know how to heat lasagna, Mom.”
“I’m aware. I’m choosing to tell you anyway.”
She released a theatrical sigh, and I could picture the eye roll attached to it. “Yes, Mom.”
“I want you to look over your chemistry notes before bed. You have that test tomorrow.”
A second sigh arrived, heavier than the first. “I know.”
“And your Of Mice and Men paper is due next week, so don’t wait until Sunday night and pretend your laptop betrayed you.”
“First of all,” she said, summoning offense on principle, “my laptop did betray me that one time.”
“It didn’t. You had seven tabs open and a smoothie balanced beside the keyboard.”
“That is slander.”
Despite everything, my mouth twitched. “Do your homework.”
“I’m doing my homework.”
“You always say that like it proves you’re doing your homework.”
“It does prove I’m doing my homework.”
She moved around the kitchen as she spoke. A plate clinked against the counter, followed by the microwave door and the muted thump of another cabinet. Home sounds. Safe sounds. They settled through me slowly, smoothing a few of the jagged places the hospital had left behind.
“You good otherwise?” I asked.
“Yeah, Mom. I’m good.” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice softened. “Seriously. Go have dinner with Aunt Blue and Guncle Evan.”
A real smile tugged at my mouth. “He is not your guncle.”
“He kind of is.”
“He’d become unbearable if he heard you say that.”
“That is exactly why I said it.”
I laughed beneath my breath and looked through the windshield at the dim concrete levels of the garage. “We’re still doing the Stranger Things marathon this weekend. Don’t make plans and act shocked when I remind you.”
“I remember.”