“Now,” I said firmly. “He’s lying there half dead. Whatever this is, I need to know.”
Her resistance crumbled all at once. She sank into the chair again, staring at her trembling hands. “He told me yesterday,” she whispered. “He said he’d…messed up.”
My pulse kicked hard. “Messed up how?”
“He said he had a sure thing.” The words left her like a confession. “He said he had a big chance—some kind of game, something he was sure he could win. He said it would fix everything.” She dragged in a breath, tears spilling down her cheeks. “But it didn’t. He lost. Said it was too much, Matty. More than we could ever cover.”
I stared at her, the words sinking like stones.
“He was devastated,” she went on quietly. “Said he’d find a way to make it right, that he had an idea. He made me promisenot to worry.” She gave a bitter, shaking laugh and glanced back at my dad’s broken body. “I guess his idea didn’t work.”
I stared at her, my pulse thudding in my ears. “Why didn’t he just ask me?” I said. “If it was money—why not just come to me?”
She didn’t answer right away. Her eyes dropped to her lap, her fingers twisting around one another. When she finally spoke, her voice was small, almost gone. “Because it was more than you could give him.”
A cold feeling crawled up the back of my neck. “Did you know?” I asked slowly. “That he’d been hassling me for money?”
Her eyes flicked up to mine, guilt flashing through them before she looked away again. “Not at first,” she whispered. “I didn’t know until recently. We…we’d been fighting about it.”
Her voice cracked then, and she pressed both hands to her face, the sound of her weeping filling the sterile room. “I thought it was over. I thought he’d stopped.”
The words burned before I even knew I was saying them. “Why do you stay with him?”
Her head snapped up, eyes wide, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t.
“He’s done this over and over,” I said, my voice rising, raw from everything that had happened—Emma, the hospital, all of it. “He gambled away everything we ever had. Every time we were close to getting ahead, he found a way to ruin it. You worked double shifts for years because of him. I paid bills he should’ve handled. He’s the reason we never had anything, why we were always scraping by.”
She was crying again, silent tears streaking down her face, staring at the floor like she couldn’t bear to look at me.
“He’s selfish,” I said, the words loud and shaking. “He’s never cared about anyone but himself, and now look at him. Look at what he’s done.”
Her shoulders trembled, but she didn’t respond. She just sat there, weeping quietly, her hand pressed to her mouth like she was holding something in.
I took a step closer. My voice dropped, rough and tired. “Why do you stay?”
She drew in a deep, shuddering breath, her eyes fixed on the bed. For a long moment, she didn’t move. Then, so softly I almost didn’t hear it, she murmured, “Because, although you can’t understand…he’s my seven minutes.”
The words hit like a punch—familiar, haunting, and completely foreign all at once.
She drew in another shaky breath. “When I die,” she whispered, “he and you kids will be what I see.”
I stood there, unable to move.
She kept talking, her voice soft and frayed at the edges. “I know you can’t see it. I don’t blame you for that. But he’s my person, Matthew. Always has been.”
She looked over at my dad then, her gaze tender in a way that twisted something deep in my chest. “You see what he is now. What he’s done. But you don’t see the other pieces. The man who used to sneak out of work early to make it to your games, even when we couldn’t afford the gas. The man who carried all four of you kids to bed on nights I could barely stand from the double shifts. The one who stayed up for days fixing the car with his own hands because we couldn’t afford a mechanic.”
Her lips trembled, and she laughed brokenly. “You don’t see how he still kisses my wrist every morning before I leave for work. Or how he hums the same stupid song when he cooks, just to make me smile. You don’t see the way he cries when he thinks no one’s looking.”
She wiped at her cheeks, staring at my dad like he was both the wound and the cure. “He’s not a good man, Matty. I know that. But he’s mine. And I love him in a way that doesn’t makesense—not to you, not to anyone. But when everything fades, when it all ends, he’ll be the one I’ll see.”
The room felt too small then, the air too heavy. I wanted to argue, to scream, to tell her love wasn’t supposed to look like this. But the words wouldn’t come.
Because even through the pain and the blood and everything he’d done, I could see it—the truth of it shining in her eyes.
I crossed the room and pulled her into my arms. She didn’t fight it, just collapsed against me, her sobs muffled against my chest. I pressed a kiss to the top of her head, breathing her in, the faint scent of soap and hospital air clinging to her hair.
“I don’t understand,” I said quietly. “Not any of it. But I do get that sometimes love doesn’t make sense.”
