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He squeezes my hand tighter. “Sweetheart…”

“No,” I breathe. “Don’t.”

“I’m so sorry, Mya. He died your senior year. Car accident. You were there.”

My lungs seize. The walls tilt. My world—the one I thought I lived in, the one I built with him—splinters like glass under a hammer.

“No,” I whisper again, this time to myself. To the dream. To whatever cruel trick my brain played on me by letting me love him all over again.

I don’t remember the moment it all came undone.

Only that I’m drowning now in memories that don’t belong here—phantoms of a life I never really lived. A penthouse I never stepped foot in. A man who only ever existed in the corners of my heart and the softest parts of my grief.

Kingston.

God.

It felt so real.

His laugh. His hands. The twins. Our twins because he wanted me and everything that comes with me.

My fingers shake as they press to my belly, as if I can still feel the weight of them inside me. As if I could will the dream back with nothing but muscle memory and desperation.

But all that greets me is absence.

Flat fabric.

The cool touch of a hospital gown that’s never seen love or light or that swaying slow dance we shared in the kitchen at midnight.

Tears fall before I feel them coming, slick and silent, soaking into my pillow like secrets too heavy to hold.

My father’s hand finds mine. He doesn’t speak right away. Just wipes my cheek with the pad of his thumb the way he used to when I had nightmares as a kid. Back when monsters lived in closets, not in the empty spaces I’d built around the people I lost.

“You’re safe now,” he murmurs. “We almost lost you. But you fought like hell to come back.”

My chest rattles with a breath that doesn’t feel earned. “It didn’t feel like a fight,” I rasp. “It felt like… falling.”

He nods, his throat bobbing. “The whole family’s in the waiting room. They’ve been here every day. Reese hasn’t left. Not once.”

That cracks something inside me. I squeeze his hand, like it might tether me to this world where Kingston doesn’t exist but they do. The ones who waited. The ones who stayed.

“Dad?” My voice is smaller than I want it to be. Like a child’s. “Can you… can you get Fletch?”

His mouth lifts at the corner. But his eyes… God, his eyes say everything I don’t have the strength to.

“Yeah,” he says, standing slowly. “Yeah, sweetheart. I’ll get him.”

He leans down, presses a kiss to my temple, and when he pulls back, there’s a flicker in his expression. A fracture of something that feels like mourning. For what I dreamed. For what I lost.

And maybe—for what I had to remember just to come back.

Then he’s gone, the door clicking softly behind him like the end of a chapter I wasn’t ready to finish.

I stare up at the ceiling, the beeping machines my only audience.

Somewhere out there, the world kept spinning.

Somewhere, my sons are alive.