Page 70 of Coming Home

I pulled her closer by her cheek, my thumb finding the corner of her mouth before my lips found hers. The warmth of her, the give of her mouth, her pulse alive under my thumb: everything I needed to stay grounded.

"If you're proposing," I murmured against her lips, "I'm accepting."

She let out a sound that lived right on the edge of a laugh and a sob. "I don't even have a ring."

"I don't need a ring. I just need you."

"You have me," she whispered, her voice breaking beautifully. "You've had me before I had the sense to know it."

"I knew it," I said, feeling the pressure building behind my lids again. "I've known since I was seventeen."

I kissed her again and told her she was the best thing that had ever belonged in my life. If this face was the last map my hands would ever know, it was more than enough.

She held my hand when the orderly came to wheel me out. She held it down the long corridors, her footsteps matching the rolling pace of the gurney, her fingers locked through mine.

She held it until the anesthesia began its heavy, warm pull, dragging my consciousness down into a darkness that was, for the first time in months, chosen and temporary. The sounds of the operating room faded into a distant lullaby, and the last thing I registered before the world went under was the warm, unshaking weight of her hand in mine.

Refusing to let go.

CHAPTER 23

Emma

The surgery lasted four excruciating hours.

Theo kept bringing me cups of hospital coffee.

Athena sat on my right, channeling her terror into frantic kinetic energy. She marched down to the vending machines twice, bringing back snacks she never intended to touch.

I sat trapped between their silent panics, replaying the horror of the pool over and over behind my eyelids.

The weight of the cold water closing over me. James's hands fisting into my clothes, his panic dragging me under as he clawed his way up over me. The sudden, agonizing loss of light. And then—the silhouette cutting through the surface above us. Those magnificent, broad shoulders and long arms, diving straight into the abyss with reckless disregard for his own safety.

Ralph had torn me from James's frantic grip. He had traded his eyes to save my life.

James had survived, but the victory was a tragedy in itself. The maintenance worker who had pulled him out had initiated CPR immediately, and the paramedics had established a pulse within eight minutes, but the human brain is fragile. The prolonged oxygen deprivation had caused severe, irreversible neurological damage. He was breathing on his own in a different wing of the hospital, stable but fundamentally gone.

I couldn't bring myself to visit his room. I didn't have the emotional currency to figure out how to forgive him, or how to mourn him. Every single scrap of my soul was inside that operating room with Ralph, and I had nothing left to give the rest of the world.

The double doors finally swung open at seven-fourteen in the evening.

Dr. Edwin and Dr. Thaddeus stepped into the waiting room, their surgical masks hanging loosely around their necks. Thaddeus' face was deeply lined with exhaustion, but his eyes weren't grim. I bolted to my feet. Theo stood a second later. Athena stopped her pacing, freezing mid-stride.

"The tumor has been fully resected," Dr. Thaddeus announced, wiping his brow with the back of his forearm. "The optic nerve itself is intact. The blindness was caused by acute trauma from the impact—specifically the orbital fracture and the subsequent hemorrhaging around the chiasm.

There is post-operative swelling, which is expected, and we will be monitoring him round-the-clock for the next seventy-two hours." He paused, looking directly into my swollen eyes. "Vision restoration will not be immediate. It will be a gradual process—weeks, possibly months—and I cannot guarantee a complete return to his baseline. But the prognosis is good."

Good. A small, simple word, but it felt like the first clean breath of air after years of suffocating underwater.

Athena let out a raw sound—halfway between a sob and a battle cry—and practically plowed past the surgeon through the double doors. A nurse down the hall shouted after her about intensive care protocols, but Athena didn't even slow down.

Theo let out a long, full-bodied exhale. He buried his face in his hands, his broad shoulders shaking for a few silent seconds, and when he finally dropped them, his face was wet and he was smiling. He lunged forward and pulled me into a hug so fierce it lifted my sneakers off the floor.

"He's going to be okay, Em," he choked out into my hair. "My brother is coming back."

"He's going to be okay," I sobbed into his shoulder, believing it for the first time.

When I stepped into the recovery room, Athena was already perched on the edge of a vinyl chair, her hand wrapped tightly around Ralph's large fingers, talking at a manic, breathless speed as if she could ward off the silence by sheer volume. Ralph was awake. Thick layers of white gauze were wrapped securely around his head, covering his eyes. IV lines snaked from his forearms, and a battery of monitors beeped a rhythmic, reassuring lullaby.