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“Where are they?” My voice rips free in a panic. “Where are my babies?”

“They’re okay,” he says quickly, catching my hand. “They’re okay, Mya. I promise.”

Tears well in his eyes. Not the dramatic kind. The kind that ache to be believed.

“They were born early. NICU early. But they’re fighters. Like their mom.”

My heart lurches so violently I think it might short-circuit the monitor.

“They’re… alive?”

He nods, voice thick. “Yeah, baby. They’re alive. They’re tiny and stubborn and absolutely perfect.”

Tears blur the edges of everything. The room. The machines. Him.

I want to see them.

I want to hold them.

But I can’t move. Can’t even lift my arm. And that breaks me more than anything.

“They’re just down the hall,” he says, kissing the back of my hand. “We’ll get there. One day at a time, okay? Right now, I just need you to breathe.”

I close my eyes, a sob catching in my throat. It feels like grief and joy are ripping me in half, a brutal kind of whiplash between the world I built in my mind and the one I’ve woken up in.

“They’re alive,” I whisper.

“They are.”

“And you’re really here.”

He nods, brushing his thumb over my cheek. “I never left.”

I swallow hard. “But I saw you. In the dream. You told me none of it was real.”

His expression softens. “It wasn’t.”

“But this is.”

“Yeah,” he says, kissing my forehead, voice breaking as he presses his promise into my skin. “This is real.”

He pulls back, brushing a hand gently through my hair. “I’m going to get the doctor now, okay? They’ll want to see you awake.”

I nod, barely, everything still hazy and heavy and not mine yet.

But when he squeezes my hand and whispers, “I’ll be right back, Mya. Don’t go anywhere,” I believe him.

Because for the first time in what feels like forever, I don’t want to.

The doctor smells like soap and sleep deprivation, like the kind of man who hasn’t left the hospital in days. His scrubs are wrinkled. His expression is not.

“Miss Sequera,” he says gently, eyes flicking to the monitors before landing on me. “You’ve been through something extraordinary.”

Extraordinary.

Not tragic. Not traumatic. Not a miracle or a mess. Just… extraordinary. Like I went on a sabbatical through a snowstorm and came back with a story worth telling.

I blink at him, trying to piece together time from the thin thread of moments since I opened my eyes. Fletch’s hand. The hollowness in my stomach. The strange, sterile weight of everything.