CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
lace and saltwater
ROOK
The hospital processed Soren's discharge with the same efficient indifference it had shown when they'd admitted him.
Soren sat on the edge of the bed in the clothes I'd brought him from his apartment, looking more exhausted than he had yesterday. His hands were steady as he signed the final form, but I could see the tremor in his shoulders when he thought no one was watching.
I'd been standing near the door for the past twenty minutes, close enough to intervene if he needed me but far enough back to give him space. The nurses had been kind but professional, and Soren had handled all of it with that particular brand of competence he wore when he was trying to prove he was fine.
The door opened and his siblings filed in, and I watched Soren's face transform. The careful mask cracked just enough to let relief and love bleed through, and when Talia crossed theroom and wrapped her arms around him, he folded into her with a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob or both.
I stepped back toward the doorway, giving them room. This wasn't my moment. This was theirs, and they needed it without me hovering.
Micah was next, moving slower than his sister but hitting just as hard when he got there. He didn't say anything, just pressed his forehead against Soren's shoulder and held on while his hands fisted in the back of Soren's shirt. Poppy tried to act casual about the whole thing, slouching against the wall with her arms crossed and her face doing that teenage thing where she pretended she wasn't about to cry. But then Soren held out an arm and she broke, crossing the room in three strides and burying her face against his chest.
The four of them stood there in a tangle of limbs and relief, and I looked away because watching felt too much like intruding on something sacred.
“I'm gonna grab some air,” I said quietly, catching Talia's eye. She nodded, understanding without me having to explain, and I slipped out into the hallway.
The hospital corridor was the same fluorescent purgatory it had been yesterday, all beige walls and antiseptic smell and the distant sound of machines keeping people alive. I walked until I found a bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, and stared at my reflection in the mirror long enough to pull myself together.
Soren was alive. He was being discharged. His siblings were with him, and he had a plan for aftercare, and I'd gotten him here in time. That should have been enough to settle the panic still sitting in my chest, but my brain kept circling back to how close it had been. How easily it could have gone the other way.
I dried my face with a paper towel and left the bathroom before I could spiral any further.
By the time I returned, Soren's siblings were saying their goodbyes. I caught the tail end of it through the doorway — Talia reminding him about his follow-up appointment, Micah making him promise to call if he needed anything, Poppy trying to act like she wasn't worried while her eyes said otherwise. They noticed me hovering and wrapped it up, each of them giving Soren one last hug before filing past me into the hallway.
Talia stopped long enough to say, “Take care of him,” and I nodded because there wasn't a universe where I wouldn't.
Then it was just us.
“You ready to get out of here?” I asked.
He looked at me with those hazel eyes that had seen too much and still somehow managed to find light, and said, “Fuck yes.”
I'd never broughtanyone to my house before other than my parents and recently Jace and Coach. The house was my refuge, and letting Soren into it felt like handing him a piece of myself I usually kept locked down.
“I want you somewhere comfortable,” I said as we hit the highway, keeping my eyes on the road because looking at him made it harder to sound casual. “And I want to show you my life. The parts that aren't just hockey and bullshit.”
Soren turned his head to look at me, and smiled and took my hand that was sitting on my knee and held it and that was enough.
The drive took forty minutes, and we spent most of it in comfortable silence. He had his window cracked, letting the salt air pour in, and I watched him from the corner of my eye as the tension slowly bled out of his shoulders. By the time we pulledinto the driveway, he looked more like himself than he had since I'd found him on that bathroom floor.
I grabbed his bag from the trunk and led him up the front steps. The door unlocked with a quiet click, and I held it open as he walked inside.
He stopped three feet past the threshold, and I watched his face as he took it in. The open floor plan, the furniture I'd chosen because it looked comfortable instead of expensive, the floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the ocean like a living painting. Gray water stretched out to the horizon, and the afternoon light poured through the glass in a way that made the whole space feel bigger than it was.
“Damn,” Soren breathed, and there was awe in his voice that made something in my chest loosen.
“Yeah.” I set his bag down. “It's quiet. Private stretch of coast — Jace is next door but you'd never know it. Just the water and the birds and whatever the fuck else lives out here.”
He turned his head slightly, and I could see the profile of his face caught in the light. The exhaustion was still there, written in the shadows under his eyes and the way he held himself like he was bracing for the next hit. But underneath that was relief, and maybe the beginning of permission to stop fighting for just a little while.
“Come on,” I said. “Let me show you the rest of it.”
The first day,I mostly just kept him fed and warm and didn't make a production out of either.
