Chapter 48
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
BARELY brEATHING
ZACK
Idon’t know when I stopped feeling the pain.
One second it’s everywhere, white-hot, screaming, pulling me under, and the next it’s gone, replaced by a strange, floating quiet that doesn’t feel like sleep so much as suspension. Like I’ve been set down gently somewhere that isn’t a place at all.
Sound comes first. It’s not clear, not all at once.
It’s just pieces. A rhythmic beeping that repeats with maddening consistency.
Muffled voices that slide past me without sticking.
The hiss of something mechanical breathing where my lungs should be, a sharp pain that comes and flows away too quickly for me to process it.
I try to open my eyes.
Nothing happens.
That should scare me. It doesn’t. There’s a calm here I don’t trust, but I don’t fight it, either.
Fighting has always been my instinct—against rooms, against odds, against inevitability—but right now, I’m too tired to push.
So I drift instead, half-aware, half-lost, floating in the space between holding on and letting go.
It’s finally quiet, here there doesn’t seem to be any pain or suffering, I’m just floating on by, and I am more than okay with this.
Images come and go like reflections on water.
Michigan winters. Gray skies. The sound of my mother laughing in the kitchen before everything shattered.
My father’s hand on my shoulder, heavy and grounding.
Sam at three years old, standing too still in a hallway that smelled like hospital disinfectant, looking at me like I had answers I didn’t know how to give.
You’re in charge now.
I was twenty and suddenly ancient.
That weight never left, it just changed shape. It became plans and exits and contingencies. It became keeping people alive by not letting myself want too much. Wanting makes you careless. Wanting gives the world leverage.
Cameron now, him sitting along the side of the group, not really fitting in but needing someone just to talk to. Me not realizing I needed him just as badly as he needed me.
Then Hazel appears, bright and impossible even here, sitting cross-legged on the hood of my memory like she belongs everywhere she lands. She’s laughing, wind in her hair, saying my name like it isn’t something sharp and dangerous to hold.
I love you.
The words echo again, softer this time. Not an intrusion, but a truth I’ve been circling without touching.
I remember the moment she said it—how my chest locked up, how fear surged so fast it disguised itself as discipline.
I remember thinking that if I didn’t respond, if I just stayed quiet, I could keep her safe from me.
I was wrong.
Her voice cuts through the haze again, closer now, real enough that something in my chest aches. “Zack,” she says, and this time there’s no laughter in it. Just insistence. “Stay.”
I try to answer.
My mouth doesn’t move.
Frustration flares briefly, then fades, replaced by something quieter and more dangerous: the realization that I don’t want to go anywhere. That whatever this space is, whatever waits beyond it, I’m not done here. There are people I haven’t protected yet. Words I haven’t said.
Her face swims into focus beside me—not memory, not dream. Real. Eyes red. Jaw tight. Determined in that way that tells me she’s already decided something and the universe can argue with her if it wants.
She’s holding my hand.
The pressure is faint, but it’s there, anchoring me more effectively than any command ever could.
“Don’t you dare,” she whispers, her voice breaking just enough to hurt. “You don’t get to leave me with unfinished sentences.”
Something in me shifts.
I cling to that pressure, that warmth, that stubborn, infuriating, life-saving presence like it’s a lifeline. Because it is. Because loving her didn’t make me weak—it made me careless in the best possible way.
The beeping grows louder. Sharper. The world tilts.
I don’t wake up.
But I don’t let go, either.
And somewhere between breaths, with machines doing the work my body hasn’t caught up to yet, I make a promise I don’t know how to say out loud, but I’m coming back to her.