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Blinding and white and clinical—like it doesn’t care what it burns through.

Then sound.

Distant. Hollow. Beeping. Whispering. Footsteps like thunder muffled in cotton.

Then…

A voice.

Fletch’s voice.

I know it like I know how to breathe. Only right now, I don’t know how to do either.

“Come on, Mya,” he whispers, so close it feels like he’s in my bloodstream. “Come back to me.”

The air feels thick. Like honey in my lungs.

I blink. Once. Twice. The light stabs through my skull. Everything is slow. Wrong.

White walls. Tubes. Machines. A plastic taste in my mouth that screams hospital.

I try to move.

Nothing happens.

“Mya?” His voice cracks, and I feel his fingers lace gently through mine. Warm. Real. Here.

That’s what breaks me.

My fingers twitch.

His breath catches, a sound like someone’s drowning in relief.

“Mya. Oh my god.” The chair screeches back. A hand cups my cheek. “You’re here. You’re really here.”

My eyelids flutter again, this time more certain. My neck won’t move, but my eyes do—dragging until I find him.

Fletch.

Pale. Unshaven. Eyes ringed with the kind of grief you can only earn by waiting.

And surviving.

“Fletch?” My voice is cracked glass. Thin. Fragile. Barely there.

“I’m here.” He presses a kiss to my knuckles. “I’ve been here.”

I blink up at him. It feels like I’m swimming through oil. “What… happened?”

He closes his eyes for a beat, breathing like he’s been holding it for three months.

“You were in a medically induced coma,” he says quietly. “After the accident. They said your body needed time to heal. You were twenty-seven weeks when they had to deliver…”

My chest jerks.

The babies.

My hand flies to my belly—or tries to. It’s restrained by tape and IV lines, a tangled mess of plastic and pain.