Around three in the morning, Fallon finally walks in, cap in one hand, glasses low on his nose, tired in the face and steady everywhere else. We all stand at once, and he raises a palm.
“She’s alive.”
The air leaves the room altogether, my mother closing her eyes for a second, Maeve swearing softly into her hand. I do not move. Fallon looks directly at me.
“The bullet passed high and lateral, it missed the heart and major vessels by luck and angle. She lost blood, we stabilized her, and she’ll be in pain when she wakes. She is not out of risk entirely for the next day, but she is stable now.”
I hear every word, but I am already waiting for the next part.
“And the baby?”
His expression shifts, gentler now. “Unharmed. We checked. Fetal heartbeat is present and strong. No sign of immediate distress. We monitor both closely.”
For the first time since the lobby, my knees almost go on me. I grip the back of the chair and look down once, hard, until the room stops tilting.
Fallon steps closer and lowers his voice. “She’s sedated and sleeping. You can see her for a few minutes if you keep it calm.”
I nod, then realize I have not spoken. “Thank you.”
He waves it off like gratitude is a tax he has no time to collect. “Thank me by not bringing another gunfight through my admissions lobby this month.”
Maeve lets out a wet laugh. My mother touches my arm once, then lets go.
The corridor to Recovery is dimmer than Trauma, quieter, built for healing and money and secrets. A nurse leads me to a private room at the end, checks my hands for sanitizer, then opens the door just wide enough for me to step in before she closes it behind me.
Saoirse is pale against white sheets, hair brushed back from her face, oxygen line at her nose, monitors tracing her back to me in green and amber light. Her left shoulder and upper chest are bandaged beneath the gown. One hand rests near her side, an IV taped across the wrist, and the sight of that small piece of tape nearly undoes me more than the blood did.
She looks younger asleep. Tired. Real.
I pull the chair close and sit, then take her hand carefully in mine, warm and alive and too still. My thumb moves over herknuckles once, then again, and I bow my head for a moment before I trust myself to look at her fully.
“You came back,” I say, voice low enough that it barely stirs the air. “You should not have had to.”
The monitor answers quietly.
I think of the road she took after I threw her out, the men hunting her, the aliases, the doctor visits in borrowed names, the file in her hands, the way she stood in my lobby and asked for nothing but my life. I think of the child she protected alone for two months while I fed my anger and called it clarity.
This is the beginning of the end, and I know it with the same certainty I know the weight of her hand in mine.
20
SAOIRSE
Light reaches me first.
Not the sharp hospital glare I expect, not the buzzing white of corridors and metal trays, but something softer and warmer pressing through my eyelids, and when I open them, I don’t see ceiling tiles but a pale wash of morning stretched across open water.
For a moment I lie still and try to remember where I am, and memory does not come in a straight line. It arrives in fragments. Glass breaking. Cillian’s face above mine. The wordbabycaught in my throat. The weight of his arms around me. Then the darkness that followed.
The room is quiet in a way that feels intentional. No hallway chatter. No distant machines arguing with each other. Only the faint, steady pulse of a monitor somewhere near my head and the low rush of air moving through vents hidden in the walls.
I turn my head slowly.
The bed is larger than any hospital bed I have ever seen, sheets white and crisp, rails polished steel. A wide window stands just beyond the foot of the bed, and beyond it the sea opens wide and unbroken, blue stretching to a horizon that looks unreal in its clarity. Sunlight breaks over the water in shifting bands, and for a second I forget to breathe because it is too beautiful to belong to a place where blood was spilled.
Then my hand moves instinctively to my stomach.
There is a bandage across my chest, tight and unfamiliar, and pain flares when I shift even a little, but that barely registers. My palm presses low against my abdomen through the thin hospital gown, and I wait for something. A flutter. A sign. A certainty.
