Slow.
Like a man who knows he’s going home.
Chapter Twenty-Two
MILLIE
The Next Morning
The room is too warm.
Hospital warm.
The kind that makes the air feel used, as though it has already passed through too many lungs before it reaches mine. I shift in the chair, and the vinyl drags faintly against my skin, the sound small but unbearable in the quiet.
I don’t remember sitting down.
I don’t remember deciding to stay.
I only remember the moment they stopped moving around him and the space filled with machines instead of people.
There’s a plastic cup of water on the tray beside the bed. Someone must have left it for me hours ago, but I haven’t touched it. My throat is dry enough to hurt, but the idea of swallowing anything feels… off.
The monitor makes a soft sound.
Not alarming.
Not urgent.
Just there.
I’ve learned its rhythm in the way someone’s breathing becomes familiar when you love them, my body noticing every deviation before my mind can catch up.
Dad’s chest rises.
I hold my own breath without meaning to.
It falls again, and something inside me loosens just enough that I can inhale.
I don’t know when I started doing that.
Somewhere between the ambulance doors closing and the first gray light of morning pressing through the blinds, my brain made a rule—watch him breathe, and he will keep breathing.
His hand rests palm-up on the sheet, fingers slightly curled. I stare at that hand until the lines of it feel carved into me. The hand that taught me to tie knots, to check machinery, and to stand still when everything in me wanted to run.
He looks smaller in this bed.
Not physically smaller.
Just… contained.
As though the world has reduced him to what fits between rails, tubes, and soft, indifferent light. I lean forward and press my forehead against the back of my clasped hands. The smell of antiseptic clings to everything, even him, and it feels so foreign on him.
“I’m here,” I whisper, though I don’t know if he can hear me. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else.
He breathes.
The sound moves through the room like a form of permission. Like a fragile agreement we haven’t discussed, but both understand.
