Chapter 6 - THE SILENT VIGILRoom 347 was dark except for the rhythmic orange glow of the IV pumps and the steady, haunting beep of the heart monitor.
Hannah lay motionless against the white pillows. The oxygen mask covered half her face, fogging slightly with each shallow breath. Without the fierce, defensive fire in her eyes, she looked heartbreakingly young—too young to have carried the weight of my enemies, too fragile to have survived the war I tried to shield her from.
I pulled a steel chair up beside the bed, ignoring the pain in my knuckles, and reached out to take her cold, limp hand.
I wrapped my fingers around hers, pressing her palm against my cheek.
“You stubborn, beautiful idiot,” I whispered into the quiet room, the roughness in my voice cracking. “Why didn't you call me? Did you really think I wouldn't burn the world down to keep you safe? Did you think signing those divorce papers meant I stopped loving you for even a single second?”
The heart monitor continued its steady, agonizing rhythm.
Beep... beep... beep...
“I let you go because I thought my enemies would find you through me,” I continued, my thumb tracing the knuckles of her thin hand. “I thought if I played the villain, if I acted like I didn't care, you would disappear into the safety of anonymity. I didn't know you were carrying my child. If I had known, Julian wouldn't even have been able to breathe the same air as you without my permission.”
A tear—the first I had shed in over a decade—slid down my cheek and hit the back of Hannah’s hand.
“You have to wake up, Hannah,” I pleaded, leaning closer, my forehead resting against her mattress. “You have our daughter. She’s fighting for every breath in that NICU, and she needs her mother. If you leave me alone in this dark world after everything we’ve survived, I swear to God I will never forgive you.”
For a second, the monitor skipped a beat.
May you like
Then, impossibly, Hannah’s index finger twitched beneath mine.
Her eyelids fluttered, struggling against the heavy chemical fog of the coma, fighting their way back to the light.
