CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
They gave him three more days in the hospital before discharge, and Mia spent every one of them at his bedside, watching the color slowly return to his face, the physical wound knitting itself back together with the exact efficiency of a body given time and rest and antibiotics to do its work.
The other wound — the one he'd promised to tell her about properly, when there was time and space to do it right — sat between them during those three days like something neither of them was quite ready to disturb, both of them tacitly agreeing, without ever saying it directly, that physical healing needed to come first.
Ruiz visited on the second day, arriving with a stack of gossip magazines he claimed were for himself and clearly weren't, settling into the chair beside the bed with the particular easy relief of a man who'd spent seven weeks fearing exactly this kind of visit might never happen.
"You look like hell," Ruiz said, by way of greeting, though his voice carried none of the usual teasing lightness, something rawer underneath it.
"Feel like hell too, if it helps."
"It doesn't, particularly, but I appreciate the honesty." Ruiz studied him a long moment, something working itself out behind his eyes. "I heard what you did out there. Breaking off from perimeter, running toward the pinned team. That wasn't smart, Nash."
"No," Nash agreed. "It wasn't."
"It was also exactly the kind of thing that's kept getting you into trouble since I've known you, and exactly the kind of thing that's also, somehow, saved more lives than it's cost." Ruiz's voice cracked slightly, and he cleared his throat, visibly working to steady it.
"I don't know how to tell you what it was like, these seven weeks, not knowing.
I kept Mia company as much as I could manage, kept telling her you'd come home, and some nights I didn't fully believe it myself.
I need you to know that. I need you to know how close I came to honestly losing hope, so you understand what it means that you're actually sitting here right now, complaining about hospital food and looking annoyed that I brought magazines instead of anything useful. "
"I am annoyed about that, for the record."
"Yeah, well, gossip magazines were the only thing at the gift shop that wasn't either flowers or a stuffed bear, and I refused to bring you a stuffed bear.
" Something like real laughter broke through Ruiz's earlier gravity, and Nash found himself laughing too, the first truly easy laugh he'd managed in longer than he could clearly remember.
"It's good to have you back, partner. However banged up.
However much recovery's still ahead of you. It's good to just have you back."
"It's good to be back," Nash said, meaning it with a depth that surprised him, the exact gratitude of a man who'd spent weeks uncertain whether this particular ordinary moment — a friend, bad magazines, easy laughter in a hospital room — would ever actually arrive again.
? ? ?
Vanessa visited the following afternoon, slipping in during a stretch when Mia had gone home to shower and change, both of them understanding without needing to discuss it that this particular visit deserved to happen without an audience.
"You look better than the last time I saw you," she said, settling into the chair Ruiz had occupied the day before, her own face carrying the distinctive exhausted relief of someone still processing how close the previous night had actually come to a different outcome.
"I feel significantly better than I did the last time you saw me, given that involved a fair amount of blood loss." Nash managed a weak smile. "How are you? Actually. I keep asking everyone that question and not getting honest answers back."
"Shaken. Grateful. A little bit furious at you, if I'm honest, for running off toward gunfire the way you did.
" Vanessa's voice carried real emotion underneath the teasing edge.
"You scared me badly, Nash. I want you to know that plainly, not just as a passing comment.
There was a stretch of about four minutes out there where I really didn't know if you were going to make it, and I don't think I've fully recovered from that yet. "
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Be careful next time, if there's ever a next time, which I sincerely hope there isn't." She reached over, squeezing his hand, the same plain, real comfort they'd traded back and forth for weeks now.
"For what it's worth — whatever this cost you, whatever recovery's still ahead of you now on top of everything else, I'm glad we did this together.
I don't think either of us would have survived it the way we did, facing it alone. "
"Neither do I." Nash held her gaze steady, gratitude moving through him at the sight of her, whole and present, sitting beside his hospital bed after everything both of them had survived together. "Have you talked to Daniel yet? Told him everything?"
"Working up to it. I think I finally have the words, now that the worst of the immediate danger's actually behind us.
" Something determined settled into her expression.
"I'm not going to keep hiding from that conversation much longer.
You taught me that much, watching you choose honesty with Mia even when it terrified you. "
"Good," Nash said. "You deserve whatever comes after that honesty, Vanessa. All of it. The good and the hard both."
"So do you," she said, and squeezed his hand one more time before rising to leave, both of them carrying, in the quiet of that hospital room, the distinctive solidarity of two people who'd walked through something together that neither would have survived quite so intact alone.
He told her on the fourth day, back at their own apartment finally, sitting together on the couch with the late afternoon light slanting gold through windows Mia had left uncleaned for seven weeks because scrubbing them without him there had felt, some obscure way, like giving up on him coming back to see the difference.
"I need you to let me get through this without stopping me," Nash said, his uninjured hand wrapped around hers, his voice already carrying the exact unsteadiness of a man about to say something he'd rehearsed and still wasn't certain he had the strength to finish.
"I've practiced this a dozen times in my head over the last three days, and every version falls apart the moment I actually try to say it out loud.
So I need you to just let me get through it, even the parts that are hard to hear, and ask your questions after, if you still have any left once I'm done. "
"Okay." Mia held his hand tighter, bracing herself against whatever was coming, some old instinct from months of reading people's tells telling her this was going to be markedly harder than anything he'd hinted at in the hospital. "I'm listening. However long it takes."
So he told her. All of it — the marina office, Voss's cold, patient calculation, the younger man producing a case that Nash had recognized immediately from every training briefing meant to prepare him for exactly this contingency.
He told her about offering himself in Vanessa's place, about the offer being refused and turned into evidence against them both.
He told her about the needle, the warmth that had spread through him with a relief so immediate and total that some small, horrified part of him had understood, even in that first moment, exactly how dangerous the relief was going to be.
He told her about the weeks that followed — the craving, the safehouse, Dr. Alvarez's gentle unflinching honesty, the nights he and Vanessa had sat together in the dark, breathing through counts that didn't always hold, both of them fighting a private war neither had any framework for surviving.
Mia sat very still through all of it, her hand gripping his, her face carrying an expression he couldn't fully read — not the horror he'd braced himself for, not yet, something more complicated, more controlled, the particular stillness of a woman working very hard to hear the whole of something before letting herself react to any single part of it.
"There's more," he said finally, his voice breaking properly now, the last of his careful composure giving way.
"The gunshot wasn't clean bad luck, either — not entirely.
I want you to know the full truth of that too, not a softened version.
When tactical got pinned down near the loading dock, I broke a direct order to stay at the perimeter and ran toward the building myself, because I knew about an entry point their schematic didn't have.
That part was right. That part probably helped.
But there was something underneath the decision I need you to know about — some part of me that ran toward the gunfire faster than good judgment should have allowed, some part of me that didn't fully flinch from the danger the way the old version of me always would have.
I've turned it over since, in the hospital, in the days since.
I don't think I wanted to get hurt, not consciously.
But I don't think I fully valued staying safe the way I should have, either.
Some recklessness got loose in me out there that I don't think existed before this assignment, and I need you to know that's part of what I'm still working through, not just the craving itself. "
Mia was quiet a long moment, and when she finally spoke, her voice was steady in a way that surprised him, though he could see, watching her closely, exactly how much that steadiness was costing her.