Chapter 31
MAGNOLIA
Morning came gray through the blinds of a room on the surgical floor at MUSC Health University Medical Center. I was still in the chair I'd been in for hours, holding a hand that hadn't yet held mine back.
I had not slept. I'd come out the far side of that night a different person than I went into it.
When Elias said the words in that firelit room—something's gone wrong, out there, Maggie—the floor had dropped out of the world.
The hours after had been the worst of my life, worse than the night men came through my door, worse than anything. Because in those hours, I did not know.
That's the thing nobody warns you about, the not-knowing, how it's its own kind of torture with no bottom to it.
They'd moved fast—the whole machine of Dominion Hall folding around me, a car, the dark streets, Claire's hand locked in mine the entire way and never once letting go—and somewhere in the middle of it, Brock's voice had come through somebody's phone saying he's alive, he's hit bad but he's alive, we're inbound to MUSC.
I'd folded in half in the back of that car and made a sound I didn't know I had in me.
Alive. He'd been alive. And then, for hours, he hadn't been guaranteed to stay that way. I'd stood on the wrong side of a set of double doors while people I'd never met opened my whole world up on a table and tried to keep him in it.
Something had been nicked. That was the word the surgeon used when he finally came out, still in his cap, pulling his mask down—nicked, such a small, domestic word for the thing that had nearly taken everything.
A vessel. He'd lost a staggering amount of blood, more than a body is supposed to be able to lose and stay a body; they'd been pouring it back into him as fast as it ran out, and there'd been a stretch on that table, the surgeon told me, gentle and honest, where they had genuinely thought they were going to lose him.
Where his heart had gotten quiet in a way that wasn't the calm I knew but the other thing.
And then, they'd found it, and closed it, and the blood had stayed where blood is supposed to stay, and the monitors had climbed back up out of the basement.
My mother had done something that night I wouldn't understand until later.
He'd come through. That was the sentence I'd been living inside since somewhere in the small hours.
He came through surgery. He was stable. He was going to make it.
And now, there was nothing left to do but the hardest thing, which was wait for him to open his eyes.
I sat in the chair and held the hand that lay slack and big and warm in mine, IV lines running into the back of it, and I willed the fingers to close.
"He'll wake when he's ready," Brock said, low, from across the room. "Man's contrary about everything else. Figure he'll be contrary about this, too."
Brock hadn't left either. None of them had.
He was slumped in a chair too small for him in the corner, still in the clothes from the night.
There was dried blood on him that wasn't his, and glass in the tread of his boots, and the hollow look of a man who'd carried something too heavy for too long and set it down and wasn't sure yet if he'd set it down in time.
Because Brock was the one. I'd gotten that much, in pieces, through the night—that whatever had happened out there in the dark, my Cash had been a breath from gone, and Brock had been the reason he wasn't.
I didn't know the details. I didn't want them.
I only knew that this large man across the room had reached into the worst moment of both our lives and pulled Cash back out of it.
There was no word in any language for what I owed him, so I hadn't tried to find one.
I'd just walked over at some point around three in the morning and put my arms around as much of him as I could reach. He’d gone still, and then one huge hand had come up and patted my back, awkward and gentle, a man who did not know what to do with being thanked for the thing he'd have died doing.
Tommy had gone for coffee nobody drank and come back with it, anyway, because Tommy needed a job the way I needed a dog.
He kept finding small ways to be useful—a blanket over my shoulders I didn't remember him fetching, a word with a nurse, that easy warmth moving through a grim room and making it survivable.
Ryker stood at the window most of the night with his arms crossed, watching the street, and I understood without being told that even here, even now, one of them was always watching the door.
Somebody always stayed. Nobody was ever unguarded. It was the ritual, moved to a hospital.
"How's the dog?” Brock asked, because he knew. Of course, he knew. They all knew what Max was to me, to Cash, to the whole impossible story.
"Out of surgery." My voice came out rough with disuse.
"Vivi sent word an hour ago. They had to go in—he'd caught more than anybody realized in all the—" I stopped, because I still didn't have the picture of what all the had been, and didn't want it.
"But he's going to be okay. They're saying full recovery.
He's tough. He's the toughest thing I've ever—" My throat closed.
"He was with Cash. Out there. The whole time.
He got hurt because he wouldn't leave him. "
"No," Brock said quietly. "He got hurt because he's exactly what your man is. And your man got out of that room alive partly because of that dog. That's the truth, Maggie. Two of them. Watching each other's backs to the last."
I had to look at Cash's slack face for a while after that and breathe.
I don't know exactly when my parents came.
The night had come apart into pieces by then, unstuck from any clock.
But at some point, I lifted my head from the edge of the bed where I'd let it rest, and they were there—both of them, in the doorway, my mother and my father, and the sight of them undid the last thing in me that had been holding.
My father crossed the room first and gathered me up out of the chair without a word, all six feet of retired colonel.
I put my face in his chest the way I hadn't since I was small and let him hold the whole shaking weight of me.
He smelled like the long drive and like himself, like safety, like the one man who'd been walking into rooms like this his whole life and coming out the other side.
"I've got you, baby girl," he said into my hair, gruff, steady.
I felt him look over my head at the man in the bed, taking his measure even now, even here, the colonel reading a soldier he hadn't gotten to meet yet.
And my mother stood a step back, and she was already crying, my mother who did not cry, my mother who'd built a whole life out of not falling apart in front of people—and she was crying, one hand pressed to her mouth, looking at me and then at Cash and then at me.
Because it was my mother who'd saved us, in her way.
I found that out later. When the call came, she hadn't just gotten in a car.
She'd gotten on the phone. A cardiologist who'd spent thirty years in and out of hospitals like this one, who knew which surgeons were the ones you wanted at three in the morning and how to make sure they were the ones in the room—she'd worked it the whole drive down, called in favors from a career's worth of them.
By the time Cash hit those doors, the right people had been waiting for him.
My mother, four hours away, had reached into that operating room with a telephone and helped keep the man I loved alive.
She would never once take credit for it. But I knew.
They'd come together.
That was the thing I saw next, the thing that went into me like warmth into cold hands.
When my father finally let me go and stepped back to stand beside her, my mother reached over without seeming to think about it and took his hand.
He let her, and their fingers laced together the easy, unconscious way of two people who had been doing exactly that for a very long time, or had just remembered how.
They'd driven out together. From Georgia, the both of them, side by side in one car through the whole, long dark—the colonel and the cardiologist, my father and my mother, who had not been in the same room in years and had spent this one holding hands in a hospital doorway.
I looked at their laced fingers, and I looked at my father's thumb moving slow over the back of my mother's hand, and I looked at my mother not letting go. Something in my chest that had been clenched since I was a teenager simply came loose.
"Mom," I said.
"Not now," she said, and gave a nervous laugh, and squeezed my father's hand tighter.
I understood that not now meant later, meant there was a later coming, meant that the thing I'd stopped letting myself hope for around the time they sat me down and explained the unexplainable had quietly, while I wasn't watching, become possible again.
My father was retired now. The mission was done taking him.
And my mother had spent this whole, terrible night in a car beside the man she'd never really stopped loving, and she wasn't letting go of his hand, and maybe—maybe—the second half of their story was going to be the part where they got to stay.
I didn't say any of that. I just went and stood with them, the three of us, and we watched Cash breathe.
It was Ryker who arranged the other thing.
I don't know how—I'd stopped asking how the Danes made things happen—but somewhere in the late morning, he stepped out and came back twenty minutes later.
Behind him, Tommy was pushing a wheelchair.
In the wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket with a shaved patch on his flank and a cone he was deeply insulted by and an IV port taped to his leg, groggy and drugged and gloriously alive, was Max.
"Vet cleared him to travel,” Ryker said, deadpan, like he hadn't just done something enormous. "Nobody at this hospital saw a dog. There is no dog. Are we clear?”
We were clear.
They lifted him out of the chair—Brock did it, gentle as anything, that huge man cradling sixty pounds of stitched-up war dog like he was made of glass—and they laid him in the bed.
Right up against Cash's uninjured side, in the curve of him, careful of all the lines and the leads.
And Max, who'd been fighting the fog of the anesthesia, went still the second he was there.
He put his shaved, sutured body flush against his person, and he laid his heavy head on Cash's chest over the heart the machines were still counting.
He let out a long breath that went the whole length of him, and he closed his eyes.
The whole room went quiet. Tommy turned around and studied the wall. Even Ryker had to clear his throat.
And that was how Cash woke up.
I was watching his face—I was always watching his face—so I saw it happen.
The flicker under the lids. The long pause.
And then, his eyes opened, unfocused, swimming up out of somewhere very deep and very far.
For a moment, he didn't know where he was.
I saw the disorientation move through him.
I took his hand in both of mine and leaned in close so mine would be the first face.
"Hey," I said, and my voice broke all the way open on the one small word. "Hey. There you are. I've got you. You're okay. You made it, Cash. You're here."
His eyes found me. Focused, slow, and landed. I watched him come all the way back into himself the second he saw me—watched the man I loved return from wherever he'd been, and know me, and choose me all over again with just a look.
"Mags," he rasped. Barely a sound. But my name.
"I'm here." I pressed his knuckles to my mouth, hard. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
Then his eyes moved, drifted down, and found the weight against his side. The gray-nothing, the cone, the shaved flank, the heavy head over his heart. Max, feeling him wake, thumped his tail once against the blanket without lifting his head, too worn out for more, and pressed in closer.
Something crossed Cash's face that I will keep for the rest of my life.
A wonder. A wholeness. His good hand came up, slow and shaking with the effort, and he laid it on the dog's head, and he closed his eyes again—not going under this time, just holding still, just feeling the two of us there, his woman's hands around one of his and his dog under the other, both of them alive, both of them his, both of them not going anywhere.
"Both of you," he breathed. "You're both here."
"We're both here," I said. "We're all here."
Behind me, I heard my father let out a slow breath, and my mother's soft sound.
I knew without turning that they were watching this—watching the man their daughter loved wake from the edge of death and reach for a dog and for her—and I knew, the way you know a thing in your bones, that my father had just finished taking his measure, and that Cash Dane had passed.
"Sir," Cash said then, without opening his eyes, rough as gravel, having clocked the room even now, even like this, "I'm sorry. I promised you a proper conversation, and a handshake. I'm afraid I'm going to have to owe you both a day or two."
And my father—my gruff, unbendable father—made a sound that was half a laugh and all the way undone. He came to the side of the bed, and very carefully, mindful of every line and lead, took Cash's hand where it rested on the dog and shook it, once, soldier to soldier.
"Son," he said, "you take all the time you need. You've done plenty for one night."