“Was it? Or was it a lifetime of staying silent even when you were miserable to avoid making him unhappy?”
He’d clocked me with that one. I closed my eyes and bowed my head. “I need to talk to him. I need him to know I love him. I was just… I was afraid.”
“He knows,” Bean said, his voice carrying over the small distance between us. “I don’t know your past or your history, and I haven’t been able to get to know you very well yet. But I know your brother, and you are the most important thing to him. He’s been working through a lot in therapy, okay? So maybe this hit close to home.”
I still should have handled it better, but I couldn’t make the words come to admit it aloud.
Pulling my phone out of my pocket, I pulled up the ride app and immediately ordered a car. “I think I’m going to go.”
Tameron made a noise. “Uh. What about Nash?”
I looked at him. “He doesn’t need me right now. He needs you. His family.” The phone buzzed in my hand, letting me know there was a car two minutes away. With the help of my cane, I climbed to my feet.
“You’re his husband,” Tameron called as I stepped toward the doorway.
Glancing back over my shoulder, I put my phone in my pocket, rested the cane against the wall, and lifted my hands to sign. ‘The marriage isn’t real. It’s not me he needs. It’s the people he actually loves.’
And with that, I turned and walked as fast as my stiff legs would allow, promising myself that as soon as I was able, I would make everything right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
NASH
I slowly blinked. Where the hell was I?
There were strange sounds. Bleeps, rhythmic ones. Like a…monitor. A heart monitor.
My eyes widened, and I was suddenly very awake. A hospital. I was in a hospital.
What the fuck had happened?
In a reflex, I attempted to move, and Jesus fucking Christ, that was a bad idea. Pain lasered through my chest, my hips, my legs, so sharp it took my breath away.
“Sshh, don’t move…” Dayton stepped into my line of vision. “You’ll only hurt more.”
“What…?” My voice was nothing more than a croak.
“One sec.” Dayton grabbed some water and positioned the straw for me so I could drink.
I carefully took a few sips. Fuck, even swallowing hurt. “What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
My head hurt, but I inhaled carefully and closed my eyes, trying to think back. I’d been in the ambulance…with Kaelan… Oh, Jesus, that truck had rammed us dead-on.
I winced at the memory of looking sideways and seeing it come at me like a massive, angry bull. My stomach sloshed, and those sips of water seemed like a bad idea suddenly.
“Kaelan,” I gritted out. “Is he okay?”
Dayton nodded. “Minor injuries. The impact was on your side.”
“What’s…? What’s the damage?”
“Compound left femur fracture, a punctured lung, and what will undoubtedly morph into a vast collection of colorful bruises.”
I let that sink in, mentally cataloging each injury with the corresponding pain. My lungs hurt when I breathed, so that tracked, and the pain in my hip was beyond anything I’d ever experienced, even with the painkillers I had to still be on. But all I had to do was think of that truck coming at me to realize how this could’ve ended. How I could’ve ended. “I got lucky.”
Dayton sent me a somewhat sad smile. “Not sure I would call it lucky, but things could’ve been a hell of a lot worse, yes.”
