His eyes...
God.
They're swollen, red at the edges, like he's been fighting tears for hours or barely done crying them. His whole face looks pulled tight with grief and exhaustion. He looks older and younger at the same time — like a man carrying the weight of the world in a boy's breaking heart.
Something inside me freezes.
I set my small luggage and the fruit basket down as quietly as I can, but my voice still shakes when I whisper, "Zach... what happened?"
He doesn't answer right away.
He just stares at me — and that alone is enough to send alarm bells screaming in my chest.
When I left two hours ago to grab clothes and essentials, he was fine — worried, yes, but coping the best he could. This?
This is a different kind of devastation.
He moves slowly, leaned over Sam, brushing his thumb over her hand one last time before he stands. He bends forward, pressing a trembling kiss to her forehead. Then he walks toward me, step by step, like the air has thickened around him.
His expression... It wrecks me.
Sad, anxious, hollowed-out in a way I've never seen on him — not even after losses, not after injuries. This is deeper. Something inside him is splintering.
My arms open on instinct.
And he collapses into them with the weight of a man who has been holding up a collapsing sky for too long. His arms wrap around my waist, crushing me against him, and he buries his face into my shoulder like he needs me to breathe.
"Oh, baby..." The words scrape out of me, raw, because the moment he breaks, I feel myself crack too.
I feel his breathing stutter.
Then a muffled sound — a soft, shattered sob — slips out of him, and it absolutely destroys me.
I wrap my arms around him tighter, one hand sliding up to cradle the back of his head. His hair is soft under my palm. I stroke it slowly, gently, grounding him, trying to tell him everything I can't form into words yet.
"I'm here," I whisper against his temple. "I've got you. You don't have to hold it together right now. Just let it out, Zach. I'm right here."
He trembles — actually trembles — in my arms.
This is the first time he's allowed himself to break since he found out about Sam's relapse.
He's been forcing himself to stay strong, to be the buffer between everyone's fear, to be the one holding the line. But the truth is written all over him now:
He is exhausted.
He is scared.
And he is drowning under the weight of loving someone who's fighting for her life.
Ever since the diagnosis, he's refused to leave Sam's side.
He barely sleeps — when he does, it's upright in that hospital chair. He picks at food. His face has thinned out, jaw sharper, cheekbones more prominent. His shoulders slump more each day.
Worry has been eating him alive.
Guilt, too — that useless, vicious guilt that he won't let go of.
He still believes he should've noticed something. The bruising. The fatigue. The signs. He keeps blaming himself, convinced he failed her somehow, that if he'd paid more attention, maybe... maybe...
