CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The waiting room at Port Callahan General smelled like antiseptic and the distinctive hush of a place built for exactly this kind of waiting, and Mia sat in one of its molded plastic chairs with Ruiz on one side of her and her own mother — called at four in the morning, arriving within the hour without a single word of complaint about the timing — on the other, watching a set of double doors with an intensity that made everything else in the room fade to background noise.
"They said soon," her mother said gently, resting a hand over Mia's own where it gripped the edge of the chair hard enough to whiten her knuckles. "Try to breathe, baby. However hard that is right now."
"I keep thinking about all the times I told him to be careful and he came back anyway, mostly whole, and some part of me thought that meant we'd figured out how to beat the odds indefinitely.
" Mia's voice cracked, exhaustion and fear tangled too closely together to fully separate.
"I don't know why tonight feels different.
Fuentes said he's not critical. I believe her.
I just can't make my body believe it yet. "
Ruiz reached over, squeezing her shoulder once, his own face carrying the exact gray exhaustion of a man who'd been awake significantly longer than she had, coordinating with a task force he had no official standing with tonight beyond the strength of a friendship that had clearly cost him plenty of professional capital to leverage.
"He's tougher than either of us gives him credit for," Ruiz said. "I've watched that man survive things that should've ended him twice already. I don't think tonight's any different, whatever the doctors are currently doing back there."
The hours that followed passed in the exact disjointed way hospital waiting always seemed to move — long stretches of nothing punctuated by small, meaningless events that felt, in the moment, enormous: a nurse walking past without stopping, a distant page over the hospital intercom, the vending machine down the hall clunking through its mechanical cycle when someone bought a coffee at three in the morning.
Mia found herself cataloguing each of these non-events with the same obsessive attention she might once have brought to a genuine clue, some part of her mind desperate for anything to hold onto besides the distinctive, suffocating not-knowing.
Her mother sat with her through all of it, offering neither false reassurance nor unhelpful catastrophizing, just a steady, warm presence that Mia found herself grateful for in a way she hadn't fully anticipated when she'd made the four-in-the-morning call.
Ruiz alternated between sitting and pacing, occasionally stepping away to take a call from someone at the task force, returning each time with an expression that gave away nothing definitive, careful not to promise more than he actually knew.
"Tell me about him," her mother said, somewhere around four-thirty, the request arriving gently, an obvious attempt to give Mia's mind somewhere else to go. "Not the case, not tonight. Just him. What he's like on an ordinary Tuesday, before any of this."
Mia considered the question, grateful for the redirection despite everything.
"He makes terrible coffee," she said finally, something almost like a laugh escaping despite the exhaustion and fear.
"Genuinely terrible. I've tried to teach him three different times and he just doesn't have the patience for it.
He reads three books at once and never finishes any of them in order, just picks whichever one matches his mood that particular evening.
He hums when he's concentrating, completely unaware he's doing it, this off-key thing that used to drive me a little crazy before I realized how much I'd miss it if it ever stopped. "
"He sounds like someone worth waiting up for," her mother said softly.
"He is." Mia's voice caught, gratitude and fear tangling together in her chest. "He's worth all of this, whatever tonight still asks of either of us."
They sat together through the remainder of the night, the waiting room slowly filling with the particular gray light of approaching dawn, and Mia found herself, sometime past five, resting her head against her mother's shoulder the way she hadn't done since she was markedly younger, drawing on a comfort she'd spent years keeping carefully at arm's length and was, tonight, simply too exhausted to refuse.
It was nearly six when a doctor finally emerged, tired but not grim, and Mia was on her feet before the woman had fully crossed the waiting room, some instinct reading the set of her shoulders as good news before a single word had been spoken.
"He's stable," the doctor said. "Gunshot wound to the shoulder — through and through, no major vessels involved, which is substantially better luck than the initial field report suggested.
He's going to need surgery to fully repair some soft tissue damage, and a longer recovery than he's probably going to want to hear about, but he's going to be fine. Physically, at least."
Something in the specific phrasing — physically, at least — caught in Mia's chest, and she filed it away even as relief crashed through her hard enough to buckle her knees, her mother's arms catching her before she'd fully registered she was falling.
"Can I see him?"
"Briefly. He's still coming out of anesthesia, and there are some additional considerations given the nature of his assignment that I'm not fully briefed on myself — task force personnel are handling some of the specifics. But yes. A few minutes, at least."
She followed the doctor down a corridor that felt a good deal longer than it probably was, her whole body humming with an anticipation that had nothing left of the careful composure she'd spent seven weeks building, and caught, just before the doctor pushed open a door near the end of the hall, a glimpse of a woman she didn't immediately recognize — dark hair, exhausted, sitting alone in a chair outside a different room entirely, a federal agent standing quiet guard a few feet away.
Something in Mia's chest recognized her before her conscious mind fully caught up, the distinctive certainty of a photograph finally, fully matched to a living face.
Vanessa. She didn't stop. Didn't approach.
Some instinct told her this wasn't the moment, that whatever conversation eventually needed to happen between them deserved far more room than a rushed hospital corridor at six in the morning, both of them raw and exhausted and entirely unprepared for it.
She filed the sighting away, the same careful cataloguing instinct that had carried her through months of skip traces, and followed the doctor into Nash's room instead.
He looked smaller than she remembered him, propped against hospital pillows with his shoulder heavily bandaged, an IV line taped to the back of one hand, his face pale and drawn in a way that made her chest ache fresh all over again.
But his eyes found hers the moment she stepped through the door, and something in them — recognition, relief, a fierce and unguarded love that cut straight through seven weeks of careful distance — undid her entirely.
"Hi," he said, voice rough, the same word he'd greeted her with weeks ago in that borrowed conference room.
"Hi," she managed back, crossing the room in three quick steps, careful of the IV line and the bandaged shoulder as she leaned down to press her forehead against his, both of them breathing each other in with a desperation that made the sterile hospital room fade entirely into background noise.
"You're here," he said, something disbelieving in his voice, like he hadn't quite let himself trust he'd actually get to see her again.
"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere, Nash.
Whatever comes next, whatever recovery looks like, however long it takes — I'm here.
" She pulled back just far enough to study his face, cataloguing every change with the same careful attention she'd brought to their last reunion, finding him thinner still, paler, carrying a weariness that went much deeper than a single gunshot wound could explain.
"The doctor said physically, at least. What did she mean by that? "
"There's a letter," he said, before he could stop himself, some instinct telling him this small piece belonged at the very beginning of whatever honesty was about to unfold between them.
"I wrote it a few nights ago, in case tonight didn't go the way it did.
Vanessa has it, was supposed to make sure it reached you if I—" He stopped, unable to finish the sentence directly.
"I should have told her to destroy it, now that I'm actually here saying this to you myself instead. "
"No." Mia's voice caught, something fierce and tender moving through her chest at the thought of it — a letter written in the dark, prepared for a version of tonight that hadn't happened, love set down on paper in case there'd been no other way to say it.
"I want it anyway. Whenever you're ready to give it to me.
I don't need it to be delivered the way you originally intended for it to matter. "
"Okay," Nash said, something easing in his chest at her answer. "Okay. I'll get it from her."
Something moved across Nash's face, complicated, and he reached for her hand with his uninjured one, holding on like it was the only solid thing currently anchoring him to the room.
"There's more to tell you," he said quietly.
"More than I could say in that conference room, more than fits in whatever few minutes they're going to let us have right now.
I need you to know it's not just the shoulder, Mia.
There's something else that happened out there, something I'm going to need to tell you properly, when there's actually time and space to do it right. "
Fear moved through her, cold and immediate, but she made herself hold his gaze steady, made herself be the version of strength he'd asked her to be on that fire escape months ago.
"Okay," she said. "Whatever it is. However long it takes to tell me right, I'll wait for that too.
I just need you to know, before anything else gets said — I already promised you I'd fight for whatever version of you came home.
That promise doesn't have an expiration date, Nash.
Not for anything you're about to tell me. "
He held her hand tighter, something in his face breaking open with a gratitude too large for words, and for a long moment neither of them said anything else at all, just held onto each other in a sterile hospital room at six in the morning, two people who'd survived noticeably more than either had bargained for, standing at the threshold of a conversation that both of them recognized, without needing to say it, was going to change the shape of everything that came next.
A nurse appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, gentle but firm, letting them know visiting time had reached its limit for now.
Mia pressed one last kiss to his forehead before she let herself be guided out, and Nash watched her go with an ache that had nothing to do with the physical wound in his shoulder, already counting the hours until visiting hours would allow her back in.
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