3. Reva
CHAPTER THREE
REVA
The ICU doors open with a soft click that feels too small for the thing waiting behind them.
Ever puts a hand on my arm and goes in first.
The nurse starts to object, then stops when he turns those dark eyes on her and says, “Thirty seconds.” He does not raise his voice.
He does not have to. He moves past her into Cal’s room with one hand near his jacket, scanning the corners, the bathroom, the curtain track, the vents, the window.
He checks behind the door. He looks under the bed.
A nurse watches him with her mouth pressed tight.
I should apologize. I should explain that he isn’t trying to insult her or make her job harder. He is just trying to keep the rest of my life from being gutted open under fluorescent lights.
I say nothing. My throat feels scraped raw.
Ever comes back to the doorway, his gaze passing over me, then gives one short nod.
Clear.
The nurse steps aside to let me in. “Only a few minutes right now. He’s still being settled.”
I move through the doorway and stop at the foot of the bed.
Cal looks smaller than he should.
That is a certain kind of cruelty. This man who filled every doorway in my childhood, the man who could make a room behave with one look over the top of his coffee mug, has been shrunken down beneath a white blanket and a tangle of lines.
A tube is taped to his mouth. Clear tubing loops toward the ventilator beside the bed. Monitors glow above him, turning every beat of his heart into a jagged green line. An IV pump clicks softly. Another machine hums. A blood pressure cuff tightens around his arm, then loosens with a hiss.
His skin has a gray edge to it.
I hate that color. I have seen it too many times on strangers. Seeing it on him feels indecent, as if the hospital has stripped him of something private and left me staring at proof that bodies are fragile no matter how much love is attached to them.
The nurse moves around him, checking lines, adjusting the blanket, making sure the drain near his side is positioned right. Her hands are brisk, careful, practiced. I watch every movement because I cannot help myself.
“That dressing is already—” I stop.
The nurse glances at me.
I clamp my mouth shut. My hands curl against the sleeves of the gray sweatshirt Shiloh brought me. The sweatshirt smells faintly of hospital gift shop plastic and his cologne. Under the cuff, rubber bands press against my wrist.
He found them for me.
Not my rubber bands—those are back at Blackwood. These are plain tan office bands, probably begged or stolen from a nurse’s station, and he brought them to me with the coffee I still haven’t touched. He did it quietly, no joke, no little flourish, placing them in my palm like they were medicine.
I don’t know what to do with being known that well.
My thumb hooks one band and snaps it against the inside of my wrist.
The sting is small. Clean. Familiar enough to keep me from climbing into the bed and trying to hold Cal’s blood inside him with my whole body.
The nurse finishes at the pump and steps toward the computer terminal. “You can stand closer. Just watch the lines.”
My legs move because she told them to.
I go to the side of the bed. Cal’s hand lies on top of the blanket, swollen a little around the IV tape, bruised at the knuckles.
He has old scars there from tools and fishing hooks and the time he tried to fix the garbage disposal without turning the breaker off.
I used to trace those scars when I was little and half-asleep on the couch, counting them like constellations that belonged only to us.
I take his hand.
His skin is warm. Dry, not clammy.
The relief hits so hard my knees bend. Ever shifts in the doorway, a tiny movement, ready to catch me if I fall. I don’t look back. If I look at any of them right now, I will lose the thin grip I have left.
“Hey,” I whisper.
The ventilator breathes for him.
I clear my throat, then feel stupid for doing it. “It’s me.”
Nothing changes on his face. The monitor keeps making its steady electronic promises. The nurse types something into the computer.
“Can he hear me?” I ask.
Embarrassment burns through me before the question finishes leaving my mouth.
Everybody asks that. I know everybody asks that.
I’ve seen it in movies, watched nurses standing beside families who asked it, watched them giving them the careful answers you give when medicine does not let you promise what grief wants.
The nurse looks over at me. She is older than I first thought, with tired eyes and a kind mouth. “We don’t know for sure,” she says. “I always tell families to talk. Hearing can be a stubborn thing.”
I nod too many times, a little desperate. “Okay.”
“Keep it simple. Familiar.”
Familiar.
As if I can reach back and gather fifteen years of breakfasts, arguments, check-ins, oil changes, birthdays, nightmares, bad report cards, good calls, stupid jokes, and every ordinary piece of life he gave me when no one else could.
I bend closer to his hand.
“Cal,” I say, low. “You have to wake up eventually because I’m mad at you, and you know how I hate unresolved conflict. I like to argue til the bitter…end. God…damnit.”
The nurse’s mouth softens.
I swallow the knot rising in my throat. “Also, your pancakes are better than mine. I tried once when you had the flu, and they came out weird in the middle. You said they were fine because you’re a liar.”
The green line jumps and dips. I watch it until I understand the change means nothing. Movement. Machine. Body. All the small facts that do not add up to hope unless I force them.
“You missed a lot,” I tell him. “Or you didn’t. I’m still figuring that part out. Either way, I need you to wake up so I can yell at you properly.”
My thumb rubs the back of his hand, staying clear of the tape.
“Delia was there,” I say.
The name changes the room for me. It shouldn’t. She isn’t here. She is somewhere with Isabel’s people, alive and unreachable and angry enough to save me while still making it hurt.
“She tried to get me away from the chapel. I think she knew enough to be scared. I don’t know if she meant to help me all along or if she changed her mind when it mattered. I guess that counts.”
My voice thins. I pull it back.
“You would tell me not to decide everything while I’m upset. Then I’d tell you I’m not upset; I’m furious, and you’d give me that look over your coffee.”
A tear slips down my cheek. I wipe it fast with my shoulder because my hand is still holding his, and I’m not letting go.
“I’m scared,” I whisper. “I don’t want to say that in front of them. They already know. It makes me mad that they know. I’m scared, and I need you, and you are not allowed to leave me with all these men who think bossing me around is a love language.”
The ventilator hisses.
I lean my forehead lightly against the back of his hand.
“They’re going to make me leave,” I say. “I haven’t figured out how to stop them yet.”
Footsteps shift near the door. One of the men. Nash, probably. Ever is watching the cameras. Nash would hear strategy even in a whisper.
I keep my eyes on Cal.
“I already lost my family behind one closed door,” I say. “I can’t do it again.”
The nurse leaves the computer and checks one of the lines near his shoulder. Her face is gentle enough that I brace before she speaks.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I need to cut the visit short for now. We have to finish getting him situated, and the doctor wants another set of labs drawn.”
My hand tightens around Cal’s.
The rubber bands dig into my wrist.
“I can stay out of the way.”
“I know.” Her voice stays soft. “Come back in a little while. We’ll make that happen.”
A little while.
Those words have no shape. They could mean twenty minutes. They could mean hours. They could mean after some new machine starts screaming and someone decides I am safer in a waiting room while strangers crack my life open again.
I bend and press my lips to Cal’s knuckles.
“I love you,” I whisper. “Stay.”
His hand does not move.
I set it down, every cell in me screaming, straighten the blanket near his wrist because it gives me one more agonized second, then step back before the nurse has to ask again.
The hallway looks too bright when I leave.
Nash is waiting with his back to the wall, arms folded, face stripped of everything except decision.
Ever stands near the nurse’s station, eyes moving, one finger pressed to the earpiece he still wears.
Shiloh has my untouched coffee in one hand and the paper bag in the other.
Deacon is farther down the hall, where he can see both the elevators and the stairwell.
They arranged themselves around me while I was inside.
A cage made of men who love me.
“I’m staying,” I say.
No one looks surprised.
Nash pushes off the wall. “The hospital is compromised.”
“I’m staying.”
Ever’s gaze cuts to the elevator bank, then back to me. “La Rosa got someone onto this floor.”
“She ran.”
“She got close enough to know where he is.”
“She didn’t get into his room.”
His jaw flexes. “Only because Deacon saw the marker.”
“Good. Then keep watching.”
Shiloh sets the coffee on a small table near the wall and steps into my line of sight. He looks wrecked in a careful way, like he has locked most of it down because there is not enough room for his grief and mine.
“Sweetheart,” he says, “we can’t treat this like she was curious.”
“I am not treating anything like anything. I’m staying with Cal.”
Nash’s voice comes in, low and final. “No.”
The word hits the hallway and stays there.
My chest tightens. “Do not say that to me.”
“I will when it is the answer.”
I stare at him. Every cell in my body strains toward the ICU door behind me. Cal is on the other side of it, breathing because a machine is telling his lungs how, and they want me to walk away. They want me to leave him behind a different set of doors and call that survival.
My hands start to shake. I hide them in the sweatshirt sleeves.
“You can’t make me leave.”
Nash holds my gaze. “I can.”
The honesty of it steals my breath.