Jay sits beside me, soot-streaked, silent.We just hold hands because there’s nothing to say.
Time folds in on itself—minutes, hours, I can’t tell.
Then a doctor appears, face grave.
“He’s alive,” she says, and my knees almost give out.“But it’s touch and go.With the amount of fentanyl in his system, there could be liver or kidney damage.The next twenty-four hours are critical.”
She pauses, softer now.
“But his brother…” She exhales, eyes shining.“I’m sorry, but there really was nothing we could do.”
That tone says everything.
For a moment, no one breathes.
Then—Lydia’s cry cuts through the sterile air.
It's raw, broken, animal like.
The kind of sound that makes the world tilt, that makes everyone else go still.She folds in on herself, sobbing like something inside her has torn open.
Across the room, I hear another cry and Mom’s arms are around Lydia, trying to hold her up as she collapses.
Two women—best friends, mothers—clinging to each other as their worlds fall apart.
And watching them, I feel it—grief ricocheting through generations, echoing through me like something ancestral.
Jake is gone and Nate might not wake up.
I fold forward, ugly, shaking sobs tearing through me.Jay pulls me into his chest and holds on while I fall apart.The others are crying too, but it feels distant, muffled, like I’m underwater and the world’s happening somewhere far away.
Eventually, they let me sit with Nate in the ICU.
Machines beep and hum, keeping him alive.He looks so small in the bed, pale under harsh fluorescent light.I take his hand—the same hand that once traced constellations on my skin—and it’s warm now.
I lean close.
“I’m here,” I whisper.“I’m holding on, but you have to, too.”
The words come easier now, spilling out like truth.
“You terrify me, you know that?”I whisper, my forehead pressed to the back of his hand, “because you make me feel everything.Every hope, every fear, every version of myself I thought I’d buried.You pull it all to the surface without even trying.And I don’t know how to exist in a world where you aren’t here to feel it with me.”
The machines keep their steady rhythm.
His chest rises, falls, rises again.
“Come back to me,” I whisper into the antiseptic air.“Please come back to me.”
And in the silence that follows—broken only by the hum of machines keeping him alive—I hold on.
PARTTWO
CHAPTER32
SUNRISES
NATE
