"I knew this was a bad idea. All of you. Out."
"Mom."
My voice doesn't sound like mine. Rough and small and stripped. But it crosses the room, and it reaches her, and she turns back, and the edge drops by one degree.
She looks at me with everything she's feeling moving behind her eyes — the fear, the relief, the questions— and she holds my hand and doesn't say anything else.
Cody comes to me first.
He walks to my bedside. He looks at my leg for a moment, and something moves across his face that I've never seen before. Not the performed emotion. Not the managed version. Something real and undefended that he doesn't try to take back.
He leans down and cries on my chest.
His arms come around me carefully, mindful of everything that hurts.
"I love you, baby." He grabs my face in both hands and looks at me. His eyes are red. "I was so scared. Don't ever do that to me again."
I open my mouth.
"Shh." He kisses my forehead. Then my cheek. Then he puts his mouth to my ear and says quietly, "We have a lot to talk about. We'll talk later. Okay? Later." He pulls back and looks at my face and wipes his own and takes three steps back because he knows — he has always known — when to give me room.
Beckett and Theo come together.
They stop at the foot of my bed. Beckett leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on me and doesn't say anything. Theo is already looking at me — the way he looked at me at the park, at the bookstore, in the alley — like he’s deep in thought.
He has a book in his hand.
It’s the same one he read to me at the park.
"What are you doing here?" I say to him. My voice still isn't right.
He holds up the book. "I'm here to read to you."
Just that. No explanation for the rest of it. No accounting for the fact that he is standing at the foot of my hospital bed next to a man I used to sleep with, while my boyfriend cries three feet away.
He pulls the chair close and opens the book.
My mother looks at all of it. At all of them. Her face holds every question I'm also holding.
"Actually," I say.
Theo looks up.
"Mom." I look at her. "Can you…”
She looks at me. She knows what I'm asking. She squeezes my hand.
“I’ll get you water,” she murmurs, releasing my hand.
The door closes behind her.
The room changes immediately. I look at the three of them, and they look at me. Nobody says anything for a moment.
I breathe through the pain in my leg.
I breathe through all of it.
Then I ask, "How do you know each other?"
