Page 27 of Roadrunner

He nodded toward the hallway. “Come with me.”

I followed him to his old room, expecting a kiss and not much else. He did kiss me. That wasn’t why he’d brought me back there.

He handed me a box roughly the size of a grapefruit.

“Open it.”

It weighed almost nothing. I shook it and heard nothing shift inside. I wondered if it was a letter. A poem, maybe.

“Why wasn’t this out with the others?”

“I wanted you to open it away from everyone.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Wasn’t sure how you’d take it.”

I peeled the paper away. Inside was another box, wrapped in tape from end to end. I gave him a look.

“Cute,” I said. “Really cute.”

It took a while to get through the tape. Inside that box was another, and inside that one, another, until the last one gave up a small velvet box, the kind a ring comes in. I told myself he wasn’t about to give me a ring. I had no idea what else it could be.

I opened it slowly.

A diamond ring sat inside. A round center stone, with smaller stones circling it.

“But—”

“It’s not an engagement ring,” he said. “It’s a promise ring.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew him well enough to know what it had cost him to walk into a jewelry store at all.

“My promise is this,” he said. “I love you.” He tipped my chin up and kissed me. “Let’s see where that takes us, okay?”

Whatever version of myself I liked to present dissolved completely. Capable, unbothered, a girl who didn’t need anything from anyone. I was just a girl who wanted, more than anything, to be loved.

Those were the words I’d been waiting for without letting myself admit it.

“I love you, too,” I said, and meant it more than I’d ever meant anything.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Alex

Now

A tube protruded from the base of Joshua’s throat. Wires ran from him to the monitors mounted above the bed. What wasn’t covered in gauze of his face had gone the color of a bruise days past its worst.

The room smelled like antiseptic and something underneath the antiseptic that no amount of it could fully cover. A machine beside the bed drew his breath in and pushed it back out again in a rhythm that had nothing to do with him. A small mechanical mercy, keeping time in a room where nothing else did. Someone had left a get-well balloon tied to the radiator from a different patient, a different room, a mistake nobody had corrected yet. It bobbed faintly every time the door opened, cheerful and completely wrong.

I stood at the foot of the bed for a long time before I made myself walk to the chair beside it. His hand, when I finally made myself look at it instead of the machines, was the one part of him that looked like his own hand still. I did not take it.

I knew what it said about me, sitting there dry-eyed while a doctor read off the odds of my husband surviving the night. I didn’t examine it too closely. I was afraid of what I’d find if I did. Some clarity that had been waiting years for permission to arrive, one that might not let me function once it did.

I pictured him in a wheelchair. Pictured myself pushing it, widening doorways, installing a ramp where the porch steps used to be. I was still arranging the furniture of that imagined life when the doctor started talking.

“As with any trauma like this, there are things we know and things we don’t.” He gestured at Joshua as he went, cataloguing him. “Ruptured spleen. Punctured lung. Broken ribs. Compound fractures in both femurs. The right humerus, radius, and ulna, and the left ulna as well. Those are certain. The spine may be swelling rather than damaged; it’s too early to say. There are open wounds to the skull that may have caused bleeding we can’t fully assess yet. If the brain was deprived of oxygen for any length of time, the damage from that can be permanent. We’re early. I want you prepared for that.”