Hands pushingMatteo and Daniele back.
“Everyone out!”
The world jerks, and for a heartbeat my eyes open somewhere real. Harsh fluorescence burns my retinas. The room swims. I see Matteo with his arms locked around our son, holding him so tightly his knuckles are white. Daniele is screaming for me, his face wet and blotchy, his mouth forming my name over and over.
The sound tears right through me.
Then everything snaps.
Darkness swallows the room in one violent blink.
“Clear!”
A voice near my ear, brisk and focused.
Three, two, one.
A brutal force slams into my chest. My body jolts hard enough that I feel the pull in every tendon. Then nothing.
“Again!”
Three, two, one.
Another shock. My entire existence narrows to an explosion of pain and then a terrifying flat calm. Time collapses. The commands, the shocks, the shrill cry of machines, they all blur into a single sense of being yanked at, over and over.
Until that falls away, too.
Silence returns.
Only this time, the nothingness feels different.
I am floating again, but there is a pull now. A faint warmth that licks at the edges of the cold. I feel pressure. A weight. The gentle, careful weight of a hand wrapped around mine.
Not a memory. Not a trick. Actual contact.
Then I feel it.
One tear slips free and touches my skin, rolling over my knuckles and sinking into the spaces between my fingers.
“Please. Come back.”
The voice is rough, thick with something he never shows in the light. It is not Matteo.
It is Valerio.
I know him instantly by the edges of his tone, the way his words are usually controlled, measured, laced with sarcasm to hide what he really feels.
He doesn’t let another tear follow. A sharp breath, and whatever threatened to break is pulled back under iron control.
“You were not supposed to go yet,” he says quietly.
The silence between his sentences is weighted. His thumb barely skims my hand—a ghost of a touch, guarded, like he’s terrified of letting anything slip. I can picture him hunched in the dim glow, dark hair shadowing his face, his unblinking stare fixed on the only fight he’s terrified of losing.
“You should have seen Matteo when they wheeled you out of that room,” he goes on, his voice just above a whisper. “He is barely holding it together. Daniele hasn’t left your side. He keeps talking to you, hoping you’ll hear him.”
My heart aches at that. Even here. Even now.
“Me…” he pauses, the word scraped thin. I feel—rather than see—the shift in him, the faint tightening of his jaw, the steadying breath of a man who refuses to let emotion show on his face.
