A way out. A shell. A lie.
“I had no idea,” Robert whispered. His voice cracked slightly. “I didn’t know what you left behind. What you were escaping from. What you were runningtoward.Who you loved.”
And Logan stood there, barely breathing, staring at the door that held the man he had once left, and swore he never would again.
Because Adrian was on the other side.
And Logan would do anything to keep him there.
The room hadn’t changed in days. Same hum of machines, same thin light bleeding through the blinds. Adrian was asleep—or something close to it—his face turned toward the window, pale beneath layers of fever and fatigue. Logan sat slouched in the same vinyl chair he’d spent too much time to count, his body stiff from hours without motion, his hand still loosely wrapped around Adrian’s wrist.
That was when Dr. Tierney came in.
There was no dramatic pause, no buildup, just the soft shuffle of shoes and the clipped, clinical voice that somehow still hit like thunder.
“He’s compatible,” he said, glancing at Logan first, then down at the tablet in his hands. “Alon’s a match.”
For a single beat, Logan’s world stilled; the room contracted into a hush. The chair creaked as he rose, absurdly loud in the sudden silence.
He didn’t cry—not fully—but the sting was instant, burning behind his eyes before he could even speak.
Adrian stirred, blinking awake slowly as if surfacing from deep water. Logan turned toward him, eyes glassy, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Alon’s a match,” he said, voice catching.
Adrian didn’t answer right away—he just stared at Logan, then toward the ceiling, then back. A smile broke across his face, tired but real. It lived in his whole body.
He asked for his phone.
When Alon answered, Adrian’s voice was barely more than a breath. “You’re a match,” he said, raw with disbelief.“Toda, achi.”Thank you, my brother.
As Adrian and Alon talked on the phone, Hebrew came naturally. It was a language that Logan could now navigate and understand without needing translation.
He didn’t speak Hebrew well—not yet—but he understood enough. Enough to follow and listen. Enough to be part of this moment and all the in-between moments of Adrian’s life, the side of his that always eluded Logan because of the language barrier that had become smaller and smaller.
They had spent so many hours in these hospital rooms, long, half-lit afternoons where the beeping monitors played background music to grammar drills and pronunciation corrections. Logan would stumble over vowels, raise his eyebrows for clarification, scribble notes in the margins of whatever notebook he could find.
“Let me get this straight,” Logan had muttered one evening, brow furrowed as he squinted at his notes. “Thetableis masculine… but thedooris feminine?”
Adrian snorted. “Correct.”
“But it’s a door.”
“Still feminine.”
“But both are just—objects! How would I even know which object is which?”
Adrian shrugged dramatically. “Ahh… I guess you’ll just have to memorize them?”
“So all of the objects are either feminine or masculine, and this is entirely random. Great,” Logan muttered. He studied the page again, frowning like it had personally insulted him. Then, hesitantly: “So…ha delet hagadola niftach?”The large door was opened.
Adrian winced like he’d been slapped with a wet grammar book. “Almost. But no. It’s actuallyha delet hagdola niftacha.The verb needs to be feminine too.”
“I quit,” Logan announced, dropping his pen with a theatrical sigh.
Adrian laughed, eyes lighting up as he looked at him. “I love you struggling with Hebrew.”
Logan groaned. “I’m so glad my misery brings you joy.”
