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His eyes open. "I'm awake."

"Stay that way."

He adjusts his hand over Graham's back and looks down at him. Five minutes later, his eyes are heavy again.

I have never seen Carson fight sleep in daylight. I didn't know he could get tired enough to lose at it. I stay awake and look at the two of them.

Everyone in this building has decided what we are, the whiteboard and Bettina and the woman with the clipboard. I keep waiting for the urge to correct somebody, and it doesn't come.

That's the part I can't get around anymore. The arrangement I built in February, the money and the boundaries and the "I won't ask you for anything," I can't explain it to myself now without hearing a lie I told to be safe.

Hildie sighs against my skin. I watch them both breathe.

The clock over the door says nine-something. Lis left an hour ago, and Carson has the chair pulled up beside the bed. Somebody lowered the lights a while back. The light over the sink and the small green pulse of the monitors are the brightest lights in the room.

I've walked twice today. Both times rank somewhere in the bottom five experiences of my life, right down there with the operating room and the day of my father's funeral. Now I'm back in the bed with my hair unwashed for three days, and my face still puffed up like I lost a fight.

"So," I tell him. "Great few days. Ten out of ten. Would recommend to a friend."

He doesn't laugh, and he doesn't shush me. He waits, elbows on his knees, and lets the joke sit there until I can hear how thin it is. I let it go myself.

"I'm glad you were here for this." My voice comes out flat, which is what happens when I mean something. "I don't know what I would have done."

He doesn't tell me I'd have been fine or anything at all for a moment. His Adam's apple bobs.

"Your pressure wouldn't come down." He looks at the floor. "They kept redoing it, and I could read the panic. Then Rao stopped saying the numbers out loud." His thumb moves over a split knuckle. "That was when I got scared."

"Carson."

"I don't scare easy, Mackie."

His voice isn't steady. It isn't loud, and it isn't managed either. He hasn't sanded this down before saying it, and that's how I know it's the truest thing he's said to me in eight months.

"I was scared I could lose you."

The old sentence comes up ready. I was never yours to lose. It has carried me through every hard thing I've ever had to walk out of, and I open my mouth around it, and it won’t come, because I can't say it while I'm looking at his face.

Then he stands and leans across the rail. His face comes down to me, and he kisses me. I grab the back of his head and pull him closer, kissing him back.

One of his hands stays clear of my middle, careful about that and nothing else. The other one slides up the side of my throat and into my hair, and he tilts my head where he wants it.

The rail digs into my arm, but I don't move. His mouth opens over mine, and he tastes like coffee. He isn't gentle about the kiss, and a sound comes out of me that I would be embarrassed about on any other night of my life.

My fingers tangle in the back of his hair and pull. He makes a low noise into my mouth, and his grip shifts at the base of my skull. I can feel everything he's holding back, and my body knows exactly what it wants to do with it, even if there is absolutely nothing I can do about that right now.

A cart rattles past the doorway, then back. We come apart, and neither of us calls it a lack-of-sleep mistake. The cart wheels fade down the hall, and he stays leaned over the rail, close, his breathing not back to level yet.

I ask the thing I haven't wanted the answer to. The babies came early. Everything changed. Wyoming didn't.

"When do you fly back?"

"Was going today. Maybe tomorrow. Planned to come back for the delivery. I guess it's a good thing I didn't get the flight made."

He'd have gone home to the ranch for three weeks and then crossed two thousand miles again at the end of August to sit in a waiting room and be handed his children. He'd have run the whole thing off a calendar in his head that he never showed me.

"You said was?"

"Now I'm not going anywhere." He doesn't look away. "I've got a man on with Wade. We're covered."