Page 163 of Diego

She comes to me immediately.

I gather her against my chest, one hand cradling the back of her head while she presses her face into my neck. Her body shakes once with a breath she cannot hold steady, and I close my eyes as relief and fear move through me together.

“The heartbeat,” she whispers.

“I saw it.”

“It was so fast.”

“I know.”

Her fingers curl into my shirt.

I press my cheek against her hair and think about that tiny flicker on the screen.

Our child.

Alive.

Still here.

And for the first time since Julia called me, I let myself breathe.

Chapter Twenty Eight

Blair

Leaving the hospital should feel like relief, but I am too exhausted to feel much of anything.

Technically, I slept last night. I remember closing my eyes for stretches of time and waking whenever someone came into the room, whenever a machine made a sound I had not heard before, whenever I felt the slightest pull low in my abdomen and immediately wondered whether it meant something was wrong.

Even after the bleeding stopped, even after another check reassured everyone that nothing had changed, my brain refused to stop worrying.

It is dark outside when I am finally released, and exhaustion has settled so deeply into me that even getting from the hospital room to the car feels like more effort than I have left. Diego stays beside me through all of it. He handles whatever needs handling, walks next to me when they wheel me out, and does not comment when I barely manage more than a few words at a time.

I realize we are both getting into the backseat only after I am already there.

“Where are we going?” I ask, although the question comes out blurred around a yawn.

I don't have the energy to object and, frankly, I'm not sure I want to. “Never mind.”

As the car pulls away from the curb, I tell myself I am only going to close my eyes for a minute, but sometime between one block and the next I end up tucked against him, my head resting beneath his chin and his arm around me. I do not remember deciding to move closer. I only know he is warm, and right now he feels safe.

His hand moves slowly over my arm while the city passes beyond the windows in streaks of light I am too exhausted to follow. I keep drifting in and out, aware of the motion of the car and the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath my cheek. Every time I wake enough to remember where I am, the hospital comes back with it: the blood, the pain, that terrible moment when I looked down and thought everything was ending before I had even accepted that it had begun.

Then I remember the ultrasound, the tiny flicker on the screen and the impossibly fast heartbeat, and I press a little closer to Diego without meaning to.

His arm tightens around me. “You all right?” he murmurs.

“Mmhmm.”

It is probably not convincing, but he does not push. The next thing I know, the car has stopped, and I blink against the darkness as Diego shifts beside me. The door opens, cool air reaches me, and then his arms slide beneath me.

“I can walk,” I mumble.

“I know.”

He lifts me anyway, and although I should argue on principle, I let my head fall against his shoulder. I am dimly aware of moving through the building, everything reduced to hazy impressions through exhaustion: light overhead, the quiet sound of his shoes, his hand firm beneath my legs and the other across my back. I catch the brief sensation of an elevator rising, so quick that I barely register the movement before the doors open again.