Page 22 of What We Become

The sound that comes out of me isn’t a sob. It’s a breath—a long, shuddering exhale that I’ve been holding since the driveway. Since the coast road. Since Milo’s voice came through the phone and said that’s the Davis property and every cell in my body reorganized around a single, screaming certainty: not again.

My vision blurs. I press the heel of my hand to my brow and grind it in, but it does nothing. The shake is everywhere now. My arms, my back, my ribs—like my whole body is being run through with an electrical current just below the skin. My mouth tastes like salt. Like blood.

I can’t fucking breathe.

It comes in hard, like a punch. I try to keep it down, to swallow it, but my chest is hollowed out and every part of me that should hold something solid is just—gone. A sound escapes me, low, pathetic, not even a real noise, just the intake before the crash.

I almost lost her.

Again.

It breaks open. I can’t stop it.

My shoulders hunch forward, and I pull her hand up to my face, burying my nose in the palm, inhaling the chemical tang of hospital soap and the stubborn, underlying scent of Sage beneath it. My body shudders with the force of it, and the next breath is ragged, and the one after that is a sob. The kind I haven’t made since I was a child. The kind I learned, by the time I was twelve, to never let anybody see. I press her hand flat to my face and bend over in the chair, and I let the grief have me.

I cry for the hanging. For the wall. For every text from a dead man’s phone number that we couldn’t trace. For the fact that I moved her into my house and told her I wanted the mess, the whole beautiful mess, and then a man with a smile and endless patience nearly took it all while I was at home chopping garlic.

I cry because I’m the detective. I sat across from Jamie. Shook his hand. Listened to him joke about hiding a body and never once saw the threat sitting at my table. Then I let him drive away with her and expected him to bring her back.

I don’t know how long it goes. Long enough that the oxygen mask fogs and clears a hundred times. Long enough that my face is a disaster and my throat is raw and the collar of my shirt is soaked.

Her fingers move.

I lift my head. She’s looking at me over the oxygen mask, eyes half-open, glassy from the drugs but present. Seeing me. Seeing all of it—the wet face, the red eyes, the complete and total demolition of the man I’m supposed to be.

She reaches up. Touches her fingers to my hair. Traces down to my temple. Rests against my cheek, palm cupping the mess of me.

“Holden,” she whispers. The mask muffles it but I hear her fine.

“Hey, wildcat.”

“You’re crying.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Holden.” Her thumb traces the wet track under my eye. “You’re leaking, then.”

I press my hand over hers, holding it to my face. My throat is thick, and I can’t stop the leaking from my eyes, so I give up on trying to be the man who holds it together.

“What happened, Sage? How did he—” I soothe my thumb over her knuckles and breathe. “More importantly, how are you?”

She shakes her head slightly, eyes blinking slow. “My best friend bricked me into a wall, Holden. I’m fucking mad about it. How about you?”

“Furious. I thought you were dead,” I say. It comes out fractured. Each word a separate piece of rubble. “When you were on that floor and you weren’t breathing—I thought⁠—”

“I know.”

“I wasn’t with you in the helicopter.” It tears out of me, the real wound beneath the grief. “I put Knox and Micah on it and stayed behind. I always fucking stay behind, Sage. I should have been with you. Fuck the scene.”

Her eyes soften.

“Knox and Micah kept me breathing,” she says. “You made sure none of us went to prison. I needed all three of you.”

“I should’ve been with you.”

“I always want you with me, Holden. I do.” Her fingers tighten against my face. Weak, trembling, but insistent. “But you were there. Just not in the way you wanted to be.”

I bring her hand to my mouth and press my lips against her knuckles. Hold them there. Breathe.