Maybe that’s what this was. A coping mechanism.
I wanted to believe otherwise. I wanted to believe the tenderness in his touch meant more than duty, more than penance. But lying there in the dark, I couldn’t stop thinking about the separation papers sitting somewhere in a drawer beside our bed. The way the wordalmoststill hung betweenhusbandandex.
How long would he stay?
Until I could walk again? Until I could drive myself to therapy? Until the guilt wore off?
My throat burned. I turned my face into the pillow and whispered, “You don’t have to keep your promises now.” I hated how small the words sounded. “But I hope you do,” I added, quieter. “Just one more time.”
They saidit was good for me to get some air.
A milestone, they called it.“A brief supervised walk,”said one nurse, as if I were an experiment on the move.
Adrian signed the order himself for the wheelchair transport, his pen scraping across the clipboard with a doctor’s efficiency. But the tremor in his hand gave him away.
I used to love watching him write his name. Back in college, he’d practiced his future signature for hours—“Adrian Hawke, M.D.” scrawled over and over on scratch paper while I studied beside him in the library. He’d tilt the page, frown, start again, determined to make it perfect.
You act like you’re signing autographs,I’d teased.
Someday,he’d said, flashing that stupid grin,I might be.
Now his handwriting looked nothing like that. It was tight, uneven, rushed. A doctor’s scrawl instead of a dreamer’s flourish. And it hit me, with a small, stupid pang, that somewhere between those scratch pages and this clipboard, he’d lost something too.
The garden sat just beyond the main corridor, fenced with wrought iron and trimmed in autumn flowers that looked too colorful to be real. The first breath of air hit like cold water, sharp and raw.
Adrian pushed my chair down the narrow path, gravel crunching beneath his shoes. He was quiet. So was I. There was too much to say and too little strength to say it.
“Are you okay?” he asked finally, stopping beside a patch of marigolds.
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what that word meantanymore. Okay was relative. Okay was alive. Okay was sitting here when I probably shouldn’t be.
“It feels different out here,” I said.
He crouched beside me, eyes flicking between my face and the flowers. “You were in a bed for nearly two weeks. Your body’s still adjusting.”
I smiled faintly. “Not just my body.”
He didn’t ask what I meant. Maybe he already knew.
The breeze lifted my hair, carrying the scent of something familiar, not our house, not our sheets, but the citrus of his cologne. He’d switched brands months ago; I remembered complaining it smelled too clean, too clinical.
Now, I wanted to drown in it.
Adrian rested his hand on the arm of the wheelchair, close but not touching. His hand brushed mine as he adjusted the blanket, fingers still trembling faintly.
I thought of those same hands years ago, tracing loops of his name across notebook paper, steady and sure, building a life we hadn’t yet ruined.
Now they shook just to keep me warm.
I didn’t know which version of him broke my heart more—the boy dreaming of what we’d become, or the man still trying to keep that promise long after it fell apart.
“The MRI looked good. The swelling’s continuing to go down. You’re healing.”
Healing. I wasn’t sure I liked the word. Healing implied wholeness on the other side, and I didn’t feel whole. I felt stitched together by grief and morphine.
I watched him for a long moment, his profile sharp againstthe pale sky, the soft crease between his brows that never really went away. He looked tired in a way no amount of sleep could fix.
“I keep thinking I should remember it,” I said. “The accident. The crash. But I don’t. Just… headlights and noise. And then you.”
