The world feels stripped of colour. Without her, everything narrows into something directionless and void. I don’t recognise myself in the space she has left behind.
My vision blurs, but through the distortion I notice something near what remains of the bedframe.
Something small and somehow intact.
I drag myself forward and brush away the black residue, my fingers unsteady.
Her ring.
I look at her in the hospital bed and can’t believe how close I came to losing her.
Never again.
She is bruised, her wrist secured in a cast, pain evident in the tension around her mouth, but she is here.
Alive.
Looking at me with those impossible green eyes that have undone me since the beginning.
Her gaze drops to her hand, to the ring resting against her finger, and she rolls her eyes.
“First you tattoo your name on my ring finger,” she mutters, “and now you put an actual ring on it.”
A smirk lifts at my mouth.
“It’s a promise ring,” I tell her.
Her brows rise, sceptical.
“This isn’t me proposing,” I continue, lowering my voice. “Not in a bloody hospital room. You deserve something far better than this. If I have to fly you to the moon to make it worthy of you, I will.”
She laughs, but I catch that subtle shift in her expression.
She is still resisting us, pretending this is temporary.
It isn’t.
“This is inevitable,” I tell her. “You’ll stop fighting it eventually.”
Her jaw tightens, but she doesn’t look away.
“You’re mine.”
I close my hand around it and press it to my lips, holding on to it as if it is the only thing keeping me here.
I didn’t have a soul before her.
She was it.
And now that they took her from me, whatever I am left with is worse than empty.
I stand and I take one last look at the room, burning it into my memory, and then I turn away.
I leave.
I walk down the stairs and out of the hospital. It feels wrong, as though I am leaving her here alone. In one sense she is still here. In another, she is gone entirely.
I have to leave. I won’t stay to see the ashes.
