Chapter Nick
NICK
As the hospital exit sign appeared on the highway, his stomach felt as though it had turned to stone.
Every instinct he had wanted to hit the gas and keep driving.
But Sandy’s hand was still in his. She didn’t say a word.
She just anchored him without demanding anything in return.
And for the first time in a long time, Nick thought maybe facing the past didn’t have to mean facing it alone.
The hallway in the hospital stretched out like some kind of bad dream. It was too bright, too quiet, and too sterile. Every step felt like it dragged through wet cement, heavy and slow, like something in him knew that once he walked through that door, nothing would be the same.
Sandy’s hand was still in his. Nick hadn’t realized how tight he’d been gripping her until his fingers started to shake. He’d held a lot of shit in his life—rage, broken bones, secrets—but this was different. This made him feel fragile in a way that he hadn’t in a long time.
They stopped in front of the door with her room number on it.
It was his mother’s room. The air felt as though it had thinned out, and every breath he took felt as though it was burning his lungs.
He stared at the number on the plaque like it might blink and disappear.
Like maybe this was some twisted mix-up, and the past hadn’t come crawling out of the grave to find him.
“Nick,” Sandy said softly. Just his name. But it snapped him out of the fog enough for him to breathe.
“Twenty-five years,” he rasped. His throat felt scraped raw. “I used to picture this a hundred different ways. Thought if this moment ever came—if she was actually alive, I’d know what to say.”
She angled toward him, close enough for her warmth to push back the cold sinking into his spine. “You don’t have to have the right words,” she whispered. “Just the courage to walk through the door.” He let out a sharp exhale. She made it sound simple, but it wasn’t.
Every emotion he’d locked down for two decades roared to the surface all at once—anger, grief, resentment, the ghost of a boy who’d spent Christmas after Christmas staring out a window, waiting for his dead mom to rescue him, but she never came.
Beneath it all, something quieter clawed at him.
A part of him that still wanted to see her.
He pushed the door open. The room hit him like a gut punch.
It was small, dim, and sterile white. Machines ticked and hummed, keeping time with the years he’d lost. And there she was.
Margaret Carter—his mother. She was older now, and for some reason, she looked smaller to him.
Or maybe he was just bigger. Her hair hung gray and limp around her face and shoulders.
Deep lines carved her skin, but her eyes were the same.
She wasn’t the ghost that he had expected.
And she wasn’t the woman he’d hated in his head. She was just a woman—human, and frail.
His hand slipped out of Sandy’s without meaning to. It felt like stepping off a ledge. “She’s awake,” the nurse said softly.
His lungs felt as though they had stopped working, as Margaret’s eyelids fluttered open. And there they were—those same pale green eyes he’d inherited but spent a lifetime pretending he didn’t.
“Nick,” she whispered.
His name, coming from his mother’s lips, nearly gutted him.
Every wall he’d spent two decades building didn’t crumble—it cracked.
And somehow, that was worse. He walked toward the bed slowly, like any sudden movement might make the whole scene vanish.
His fingers brushed the cold metal railing, anchoring himself to something solid.
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “It’s me.”
Her hand lifted from the sheets—shaking and paper-thin. She was the skeleton of a woman he remembered. He should’ve stepped back. Should’ve protected what was left of his armor. But he didn’t. He let her hand rest on his. It wasn’t forgiveness. Not even close. But it was real.
The sound of the machines was too damn loud. Beep. Beep. Beep. Each one tapped against his skull like a hammer. Nick stood at the side of the bed, fists clenched tight, knuckles aching. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to run or scream.
She was right there and very much alive. After twenty-five years of silence. Twenty-five years of convincing himself she was a ghost. Her fingers were small in his, skin paper-thin, bones like twigs. When he didn’t pull away, something flickered in her eyes—relief, guilt. Maybe both.
“You came,” she whispered, voice rasping like dry leaves.
He barked out a laugh that sounded nothing like a laugh. “Yeah. I came.” His throat burned. “Is that all you wanted from me? You just needed me to obediently show up?”
Her mouth trembled. “Nick—”
“Don’t say my name like that.” His voice sliced through the quiet, jagged and sharp. “You don’t get to say my name like that.” The nurse shifted by the door, sensing the heat between them, but Sandy caught her eye and gave a slight shake of her head. This wasn’t anyone’s to fix but him and her.
Margaret swallowed. “I never stopped thinking about you.”
“Bullshit,” he shot back, flat and fast. “You let me believe you were dead. I grew up thinking that I was all alone in this world because you had died.”
Her eyes filled, and suddenly she didn’t look like the ghost he’d been fighting all these years.
She looked like someone drowning. “I was dead, Nick. At least, that’s what the cops wanted your father to believe.
They put me into witness protection and told me that I wasn’t allowed to contact you.
They said that if I did, I’d put you in danger. ”
He flinched. “So you disappeared.”
“I didn’t want to put you into danger. I thought that leaving you in foster care, to grow up, was the best way to keep you safe,” she admitted.
“Maybe you should’ve let me decide that.” His voice cracked on the last word, loud enough to make the machines stutter. His breath came in hard bursts, a storm he’d carried for years finally breaking land. “I was a kid. And you—” His chest heaved. “You just let me go.”
Tears slid down her temples onto the white sheets. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”
He laughed again, but it was a raw, fractured sound. “You thought wrong.”
Silence thickened around them, the beeping cutting through like a metronome counting out everything they’d lost. Sandy stayed by the door—steady and quiet. And somehow, that made all this easier for him.
Nick pressed a hand to his forehead, dragging in a breath that made his lungs burn.
“Do you know what it’s like to spend Christmas after Christmas waiting at the damn window?
” His voice was low, wrecked. “I used to count the cars that passed the house I was in. Every time the headlights slowed down, I thought—she’s back.
I told myself that they had it all wrong and that you weren’t really dead.
I let myself believe that you had come back to take me home with you. ”
Her sob was small but violent, torn from somewhere deep inside of her. He stared at her—not the monster he’d built in his head, but a woman with sunken cheeks and shaking hands who’d carved a hole in him so deep nothing had ever filled it—except Sandy.
“Why now?” he asked. “Why, after all this time, are you telling me that you’re alive?”
“Because I don’t want to die without you knowing that I never stopped loving you,” she whispered, voice breaking. “And because I ran out of time to be brave.”
The words slammed into him like a blow. He wanted to reject them. To throw them back at her like shrapnel. But beneath the anger, beneath all the years of bitterness and rusted steel, something shifted inside of him. It was something small—something still alive deep inside of him. Hope.
It would’ve been easier to hate her. God, it would’ve. But standing here with her hand clinging to his like it might keep her tethered to the world, Nick couldn’t hate her the way he wanted to.
He dragged a hand down his face. “You don’t get to just show up in my life again and fix twenty-five years with a few words.”
“I know,” she whispered. And for once, she didn’t try to explain it away.
The air in the room settled heavy between them—not forgiveness, not understanding.
Just truth. Ugly, sharp, and real. Nick let out a shaky breath and sank into the chair by her bed.
His pulse still hammered like it wanted to break free of his skin.
But he stayed, and for now, that was enough.
Nick squinted at the brightness of the fluorescent lights in the hallway.
He pushed the door shut behind him and leaned against the cold wall, pressing his palms flat against the painted plaster like it might hold him upright.
His chest felt hollow as he tried to catch his breath.
The sound of the machines still rang in his head, sharp and steady—beep, beep, beep—like it had branded itself into his memory.
He dragged a shaky breath in, and it tasted like metal and antiseptic. God, he hated hospitals.
Sandy had followed him out of his mother’s room and didn’t say anything at first. She just stepped out beside him, not standing too close to him, giving him enough space to breathe.
She had that quiet kind of presence that didn’t demand anything from him and didn’t try to fix him.
She was just there, lending her support, and he appreciated that more than she’d ever know.
Nick stared straight ahead at the polished floor. “She looks so fucking small,” he said finally. His voice was rough, like gravel. “Like time chewed her up and spit out whatever was left.”
Sandy turned toward him. “I know that was hard for you, Nick. But you did great.”
“She said she loves me,” he whispered. His fingers flexed at his sides.
“After everything that I went through as a child, she just said it like it was easy.” Sandy’s hand found his.
She didn’t lace their fingers, didn’t squeeze.
She just touched him, seeming to need the contact as much as he did.
Her hand in his was a steady weight, giving him something solid to hold onto as he worked through his pain.
He let out a bitter laugh that shook loose from somewhere low in his chest. “I spent half my life wishing I could hear her say those words to me, but hearing them now just hurts.”
“That’s what the truth does sometimes,” she murmured. “It hurts before it heals.” Nick tilted his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Her words didn’t fix things for him, but then again, she wasn’t trying to do that. They cut through the noise in a way nothing else could.
She slid her hand fully into his, threading their fingers together, and it felt like a healing balm to his soul.
He squeezed back—hard enough that she’d feel it, soft enough that it wouldn’t hurt.
“You don’t have to forgive her today,” Sandy said.
“Or ever. Just take your time, and the rest will work itself out.”
Nick let out a low sound. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. “That’s harder than it sounds. She doesn’t look like she has a lot of time left, honey.”
“I know,” she said.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. The hospital lights turned her hair to gold at the edges and softened the worry in her face.
He could see in her eyes that she wasn’t pitying him.
She was just offering him comfort. It was why he knew that bringing her along was a good idea.
She did that for him—comforted him, and the way that she looked at him made him feel things that he’d never felt for any other person—ever. And God, that felt dangerous.
“She’s not the woman I remember from when I was just four years old. In my head, she was different, you know?” he said quietly. “She’s smaller, weaker, and seems more human now, if that makes any sense.”
“That’s usually the way it goes,” Sandy said.
“You were just a little boy when you lost your mother, so of course you’re going to remember her differently than she actually was.
” His throat tightened. For years, he’d imagined this moment as something violent or final—yelling, walking out, slamming the door on the past for good.
He hadn’t expected it to feel like this—standing in the middle of a storm that had already blown through.
Sandy leaned against the wall beside him, their shoulders brushing. The contact was barely there, but it steadied him in a way nothing else did. “Hey,” she said softly. “You don’t have to know what to do with all of this right now.”
Nick exhaled slowly. “Good. Because I don’t.”
She smiled then—small and gentle. It was the kind that didn’t demand anything from him.
She was just offering him a place to land.
He let their silence stretch out between them.
The ache in his chest didn’t fade, but it settled into something he could hold without breaking.
And when she finally tugged his hand, leading him down the hallway toward the exit, he didn’t fight it.
He was ready to leave his past behind him.
She was right—he didn’t have to decide what to do about his mother today.
But he knew that sooner or later, he’d have to make some hard and fast decisions about the woman who had just left him to grow up in the foster care system.
Having Sandy beside him was exactly what he needed.
And for the first time in a long damn time, Nick let someone walk beside him instead of going it alone.
She had quickly become his everything, and it was about damn time that he told her exactly how he felt about her.
He wasn’t just falling for Sandy; he was already in love with her, and giving her the words was exactly what he needed to do.