Chapter 26 RONAN
Ronan
The first thing I want is Tessa.
Before I open my eyes. Before I know where I am. Before I understand the monitor somewhere beside me, the oxygen under my nose, the ache in every part of my body.
Her.
I blink against a ceiling that isn’t mine. This one is white and close and washed in fluorescent light, and somewhere near my head something keeps beeping with patient, mechanical certainty.
A monitor. Mine.
Memory doesn’t return all at once. It comes in flashes.
The study.
The floor.
Her hand against my face.
Her voice, steady enough for both of us.
Stay with me.
My eyes snap fully open.
Tessa.
I turn my head before I’ve even decided to.
She’s there.
Curled into the chair beside the bed like she never meant to sleep at all, one cheek resting on folded arms at the edge of my mattress, one hand still wrapped loosely around mine.
She never let go.
She’s still wearing my T-shirt.
I look at her for a long time. Hair half out of its tie, mascara gone, a crease down one cheek from her own sleeve. Beautiful.
I spent two months in beds exactly like this one, and there was never anyone in the chair, because I’d never let anyone close enough to sit in it. I built a life specifically so no one would ever have to fold themselves into vinyl and wait to see if I’d open my eyes.
She did it anyway. For me. In my shirt, with her hand around mine, refusing to let go even in her sleep.
What I feel looking at her has nothing to do with nearly dying.
I love her.
I don’t say it.
Not because it isn’t true. Because it’s the truest thing I have ever known, and I will not say it for the first time in my life from a hospital bed with a tube in my nose, weak and wired to a machine.
She deserves better than a hospital confession.
Better than words dragged out of me by fear instead of earned one ordinary Tuesday.
I want to say it standing up. On my own feet.
So I hold it. Same as I’ve held everything, my whole life. It’s the thing I’m best at, and for the first time it feels less like strength and more like the reason I’m in this bed.
Her eyes open.
It takes her a second to surface. Then she sees me looking at her, and she’s up out of the chair before she’s fully awake. “Ronan—”
She’s at the side of the bed with her hands framing my face, and the tears are already coming, spilling over before she can do anything about them.
“There you are.” Her thumbs move over my cheekbones like she’s making sure I’m real. “There you are. Hi.”
She’s smiling and crying at the same time, and then I watch her remember what she is. She wipes her eyes fast with the back of her wrist. Her hands stay on my face, but her eyes go up past me to the monitor—the numbers, the lines, the color of me, all of it in about two seconds, quick and clinical.
“You still have my shirt,” I tell her. My voice is gravel, my throat raw.
She looks down at the wrinkled cotton, and a laugh breaks out of her, startled and wet. “I never went home.”
“I can see that.” I lift the hand without the needle and catch the tears with my thumb. “Come here.”
She leans over me, and I slide my arm around her shoulders, careful of the lines, and she folds down against me anyway, her face tucked into the side of my neck.
“It was a massive PE,” she says into my throat. “Another twenty minutes and we would not be having this conversation. Twenty minutes, Ronan. And I was standing on the wrong side of a door that has never been closed to me before, and I could not do one single thing about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not done being angry.”
“I gathered.”
“I’m going to be angry for a while.” Her voice cracks. “I’m just going to do it right here.”
I rub the back of her head, fingers up into her hair, and kiss the top of it, smiling where she can’t see.
“All right.”
My hand stays in her hair, and I don’t say it, and I feel her not say it either, and we stay like that in the beeping quiet.
* * *
Sadie comes in an hour later, when Tessa has finally been persuaded to go find real coffee and food she won’t eat.
My sister stops just inside the door and looks at me, and I watch her do the thing I taught her to do, the thing our whole family did, which is to lock everything down behind a blank face before it can be used against her.
Then she doesn’t manage it. Sadie Sinclair, who runs an emergency department, who has told more people than she can count that someone they love is gone, stands in the doorway of my room and her chin goes, once, hard.
“You absolute idiot,” she says.
“I’ve been told.”
“No.” She crosses the room fast. “No, you don’t get to joke.
I got a call at six in the morning from your nurse, who could barely keep her voice together, telling me your heart was one bad minute from stopping.
I drove to my own hospital not knowing if I’d be walking into your room or your—” She stops.
Her jaw works. “I hold your medical power of attorney, Ronan. Do you understand what I was driving there prepared to have to decide?”
I do. I hadn’t, until she said it. I do now.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
She sits down hard in the chair Tessa left.
Takes my hand, the way our mother used to, back before all of it.
“You hid it,” she says quietly. “The pain. The leg. You felt it coming and you said nothing, because you’d rather have died on your own terms than gone back to being looked after.
I know you. I know exactly what you did. ”
There’s no point denying it to Sadie. She learned the same silence I did, in the same house.
“I didn’t think it was that,” I say. “I told myself it was the leg press.”
“Of course you did.” Her eyes are bright, furious, and entirely without pity, which is the only kind of comfort I’ve ever known how to accept.
“You don’t get to do that anymore. You have someone now who called it on your study floor with her fingers on your pulse, climbed into the ambulance after you, and then sat down outside my department because they wouldn’t let her follow.
You don’t get to make her bury you because you were too proud to say your leg hurt. ”
She hadn’t told me that part.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, Sadie.”
She holds my hand and doesn’t say anything else for a while, and neither do I, and that’s about as close as the two of us have ever come to the thing other families do easily.
* * *
Tessa comes back when Sadie leaves, coffee in hand, and takes one look at me and knows I’ve been put through it. She sets the cup down and comes to the side of the bed.
“You should sleep,” I tell her.
“So should you.”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer that. She toes off her shoes, lifts the blanket just enough, and settles carefully beside me, fitting herself against my good side with her hand over the center of my chest. I turn my head into her hair and don’t say a word, because I want her where she is.
Somewhere in the quiet, my fingers search for the familiar edge of the coin without asking permission.
The quarter is forty minutes up the coast, on a nightstand, where I left it.
I didn’t have it this morning.
I lived anyway.
My hand finds her instead.
I’ve been carrying the wrong thing in my pocket my whole life.