Silence stretched between them, not empty but crowded with everything neither seemed willing to say.
A soft knock interrupted it, and the door opened before either could answer. A discharge nurse entered with a clipboard in her hand, cheerful in the efficient way hospital staff often were whentrying to make hard moments feel routine.
“Good morning,” she said. “I’ll just go over a few final papers, and then we’ll get you downstairs.”
Randi’s shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly.
Brew stepped aside, giving the nurse room, but he didn’t leave. He remained there while instructions were reviewed, medications explained, appointments confirmed.
Randi signed where she was told with difficulty, feeling as if she were watching someone else’s life being handed back in stapled pages and bullet points.
When the nurse finally stepped back out to retrieve the wheelchair, the room fell quiet again.
The kind of quiet that knows won’t last.
Randi looked at the bag beside her, then back at him.
“I thought I’d be more excited to get out of here.”
“That’s normal.”
She gave a faint smile.
“Is that your answer for everything?”
“Often.”
She hesitated, then asked the question that had been hovering all morning.
“Do you ever get used to it?”
“To what?”
“Walking away after all this.” Her voice softened. “Fixing what you can and then just… being done.”
Something moved behind his eyes then. Something deeper than fatigue.
“No,” he said quietly. “You just learn not to show it.”
The honesty of it struck her harder than she expected.
She looked down, blinking back the sudden sting of tears building at the back of her eyes.
“I’m glad it was you.”
He went still.
Not visibly, perhaps. Not to anyone else. But she felt it.
When she looked back up, his expression had changed—not losing its composure, but carrying something warmer, more vulnerable beneath it.
“So am I,” he said.
The words settled between them with a gravity that neither could undo.
The door opened again.
This time the discharge nurse returned, a wheelchair in front of her.
