25. Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ava
Asteady beeping penetrates my consciousness, and then I become aware of familiar voices talking around me. But it feels like I’m coated with a thick substance, struggling to peel it off, so I can open my eyes.
I groan.
“Ava?” Maren’s voice comes close. “Ava?”
“She’s awake again?” Gage asks.
Someone takes my hand, which is heavy like a boulder on the end of my arm. With tremendous effort, I crack open an eye. Light streams in from the large windows, and I rear back at the brightness.
“Where am I?” I ask, groggy.
“The hospital,” Nathaniel says, peering over me. “Still the hospital.”
The accident comes back in a rush of crunching metal, screams of pain, and my desperate attempts to hold onto… “Landon,” I cry. “Oh, my god. Where’s Landon?”
“He’s okay,” Sawyer says. “He’s in the children’s wing of the hospital, but he’s okay.”
“If you’re all here,” I say, looking around at my siblings, “who’s with him?”
“Ember and Stephen,” Gage says. “But we’ve all been rotating through. Stephen’s hardly left the kid’s side except to be with his mom after her surgery.”
“Why is Stephen… Was his mom in the accident?” I ask, unable to connect the dots. “Did she hit us?”
“Ava seems a lot more alert this time,” Maren says.
“They don’t know who hit you yet,” Nathaniel says. “Owen and the police are working on it. Stephen’s mom fell at home the same night as your accident.”
Slowly, I draw my hand up to my forehead that’s lightly pounding. Right, Stephen left my mother’s house in a hurry. Oh, god. After he pinned Raul to the wall. The memory is fuzzy. Did that happen?
“Your head?” Sawyer asks. “I can request more pain meds.”
“No, I mean yes, but…” Everything is muddled, confused. “Landon—is he really okay?”
“Yes,” Nathaniel says, and he peers down at me again. “I wouldn’t lie about that.”
“Why do I feel like this?” I ask.
“Concussion. Postsurgery pain from the collapsed lung they repaired, and your ribs are probably sore. You have a couple broken ones,” Sawyer says.
“How long? How long have I been here?” I ask.
“Three days,” Gage says. “You’ve been in and out of consciousness.”
“Three days!” I exclaim. “I need to see Landon. He must be wondering where I am.” I try to lift the covers.
“This is what gets you sedated,” Gage warns, stilling my movement with his hand. “You gotta stop doing this.”
“What?” I whisper. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve woken up a few times,” Nathaniel says, “and you get worked up about the accident or Landon or…” He shrugs. “You try to get up. They have to knock you out.”
“Oh,” I say. “I need to see Landon, though. Can I… Can I see him?”
“If you’ll stay in bed, we can talk to the doctors. Maybe we can wheel you up or wheel him down or figure out a way to get you both in the same room now that you’re stable and reasonable,” Sawyer says.
“Raul’s been flown to Boston,” Gage says. “Swelling on his brain. I haven’t heard much else.”
“Oh,” I say, embarrassed that I didn’t even remember Raul, that it didn’t even occur to me to ask. That I didn’t even wonder if he was with Landon.
“I’ll go find out about how you can see Landon,” Maren says, exiting the hospital room.
Heaviness settles over me again, and I let out a sigh. “I’m tired. I think I need more sleep.”
“Yeah,” Nathaniel says. “We’ll get you and Landon together somehow. You just rest.”
The next time I wake up, the heaviness on my eyes, on my head, is gone. The room is dark, but when I stir, someone springs to life in the chair beside me.
“Ava.” A familiar face appears above me.
“Stephen?” A tremendous sense of relief causes my limbs to tingle. I cup his face, staring at him in the glow from the streetlights outside. His eyes are almost a coppery color, and they’re brimming with concern. “You’re here,” I whisper.
“I should never have let him take me off your detail,” he says. “This never would have happened if I’d been driving.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’m paid to… My job is to plan for the unknown.” His thumb skims my cheek. “Landon’s here. Your family got him moved into the room with you. But he’s sleeping.”
“Is he really okay?” Tears spring to my eyes again. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Deep cuts on his arms and legs. A nasty concussion. He had a couple blood transfusions due to blood loss. But he’s going to be okay.” He meets my gaze. “He’s going to be okay.” His voice is thick. “I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”
“I tried…” I swallow down my tears. “I tried so hard to hold on to him.” The lump in my throat makes it impossible to say more, and I stifle a sob. “But I… But I…”
“Shh,” Stephen says, smoothing my hair off my forehead. “You’re not to blame here, Ava. The accident had nothing to do with you. What Datu told me about the accident—there’s no way you could have held onto anyone. You’re lucky to be alive. ”
His fingers trace my face, the lightest touch, but I lean into it. Waking up to all my siblings earlier should have been this kind of solace, but instead, it felt exhausting. But here, in the darkness, with Stephen’s gentle touch, big presence, and deep voice, that’s where real comfort lives.
“I need to see him,” I say. “Can you help me?”
Stephen backs away, and the head of my bed begins to rise until I’m straight enough that I can peer across the space to where Landon’s small body is sleeping deeply.
His little chest rises and falls, and I watch it, mesmerized, the same way I used to be when he was an infant, like I couldn’t quite believe that someone so amazing came from me.
Then the pounding in my head registers, and I wince from the sensation.
“Do you need more medication?” Stephen checks his watch. “You’re almost due. If it’s worn off, I’ll get them in here.”
“No,” I say. “It’s okay. The pain is tolerable.” It almost isn’t. “How’s your mom?”
Stephen raises his eyebrows and lets out a long breath. “Someone told you?” He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “Recovering. Broken hip. A long road, I think. Vanessa and I are moving them into an assisted-living place in Rockdown. Dad’s already there.”
“Oh, really?” I breathe out, trying to ignore the way my chest aches with the motion.
“You should take the pain relief,” Stephen says, lowering my bed again. “It’ll help.”
“I don’t want to go back to sleep.”
“They can give you something that won’t knock you out. They were keeping you sedated because you were a danger to yourself.”
“If they’d put Landon in here instead of a different room, they’d have had no problem.”
Stephen just looks at me.
“Less of a problem,” I concede.
His knuckles sweep across my cheek again, tenderness in his gaze, his touch.
And it’s like my whole soul releases a swoony sigh.
How did I exist in the world without him?
It seems unfathomable now. That I could be any version of happy without him.
Everything in me wishes I was well enough to curl into him, crawl into his lap, and let all my worries ease.
I never understood what a privilege his presence was.
Sometimes, without saying a word, he took all my hopes and fears and melded them into things that felt possible instead of impossible.
I was such a fool.
He takes my hand, and his thumb moves back and forth over the back of it, a steady motion. “You scared me.” His voice is gruff. “You both scared me.”
“I’m sorry for everything I said the night you left.” My voice is hushed, but life suddenly feels short, fleeting, and I’ve fucked up so much already. I want him to forgive me, even if it’s unreasonable.
“You can’t help how you feel,” he murmurs.
“But I didn’t mean it. Not in the truest sense.”
“We don’t need to talk about this right now. The doctor’s told all of us not to put any unnecessary stress on you.”
“The stressful part is that you don’t believe me.”
“You meant it, Ava,” he says, giving me an exasperated glance. “Would you have changed your mind later? Maybe. I’ll concede that much. Maybe you’d have changed your mind later.”
“But I don’t want you to hate me for it.”
“I’ve never hated you for it. I hated myself for wanting you and that life so badly.”
“Stephen,” I say, his name garbled by the sudden lump in my throat.
He places a lingering kiss on my forehead, one hand cupping my cheek, the other hand still engulfing mine. I savor the warmth of his presence, how his familiar scent drifts down, settling over me.
“It’s okay.”
“It doesn’t feel okay at all.” I push out around a partial sob, and this almost crying is doing a number on my chest, my newly inflated lung.
“You can’t help how you feel, Ava. Neither of us has ever been able to help how we feel. Would have been so much easier if we could have, huh?”
When he tries to draw back, I grip his neck, keeping him close. I want to burrow into him and never leave again. “I have a lot of regrets.”
He searches my expression with an unexpected intensity. “Why did you get the DNA test for Landon?”
I let him go as though he’s burned me. “Why?”
“Did you think he was mine, Ava?” He braces his hands on either side of my pillow, his biceps popping out of the edges of his T-shirt.
“I wanted him to be yours,” I admit out loud for the first time, my voice laced with tears. “I was sure he was yours. Nothing else made sense.”
“And you got the test because?”
“Oh, god.” I turn my head to the side, avoiding his piercing gaze, but that only puts his muscles in my direct line of sight.
Not helpful. “Why are we talking about this? I don’t want to talk about this.
It makes me feel like an idiot. A terrible person.
” I sneak my hands up between us to press my fingertips into my temples, my head pounding again.
He backs off and hits the call button beside my bed. When a nurse cracks open the door, light from the hall streams in, and Stephen says, “She needs some pain meds.”
With him out of my space, I rub my face with my hands, and I wonder if I can really tell him the full truth. The Ava in this bed can’t help wondering if past me was too weak, too easily led. If I took one foolish mistake and compounded it by a thousand.
“Why do you need all the details?” I ask.
“We can talk about it later.” The intensity in his expression hasn’t eased. “Your doctor will kick me out if I get you to the point where they have to sedate you again.”
“Oh, please,” I say with a huff that makes my chest ache again. “My son is right there. Why would I need to be sedated again?”
“Fine, then, Ava. Tell me why you needed the DNA test.”
“You know why.”
“I need you to say it.”
I stare at him, and tears pool in my eyes again.
Unable to face him, I stare out the window into the glow of the streetlights.
“I was mad at you for saying we were done when that was never true. Or at least it never stuck. But you’d never said that to me before.
I was the one who broke things off, not you. ”
He doesn’t say anything, but he’s so still in the room that it makes the ache in my chest, probably from my surgery and my broken ribs, but also from remembered heartbreak, that much worse.
“And?” he prompts when I don’t continue.
But I don’t know if I can get it out, if I can tell him the rest without breaking down. It’s been years, but I’ve never been as low as I was after he left. How do I make him understand something I’m not sure I truly survived?
“If I tell you all of this—the whole truth—you have to tell me about your accident.” I turn to face him. “That’s the only deal I’m willing to make.”
The nurse knocks lightly on the door and comes over to my IV, injecting medication. Almost immediately, the pounding in my head ceases.
Stephen’s gaze, which has been glued to my face, softens. “See?” he says. “No need to torture yourself.”
The nurse leaves, and Stephen lets out a deep sigh. “I signed an NDA about the accident.”
“She just drugged me. I’m unlikely to remember anything.” I cross my heart, and his lips quirk in a hint of a smile.
“You’re feeling those drugs, aren’t you? I think you’d probably tell me what I want without the deal.”
“Nope,” I say, popping the P.
“You trust me, I’ll trust you,” he says with a little nod.
“Just like old times,” I whisper.