I detected the seam in her voice, the place where the word didn’t quite hold together. But she offered nothing more, and I didn’t press. Not yet. She had shouldered her burdens for two days without me; she’d earned the right to set them down on her own terms.
Still, I tried to push myself upright again.
“Hey—no.” She moved closer instantly, one hand coming up. “You’re not getting up yet.”
“I’m not staying flat on my back indefinitely,” I countered.
“You’re staying exactly where you are right now,” she said, and there it was—that unyielding edge in her voice.
I let out a slow, resigned breath. “Bossy.”
“Alive,” she retorted without missing a beat.
That pulled a faint smirk from me despite everything, and for a second, something lighter moved between us, brief, quiet, and real.
Then I looked at her again, properly, letting the weight of it settle into the words before I spoke them. “You kept them safe, Lib.”
Her eyes softened in a way she didn’t try to hide.
“We all did,” she said.
I held her gaze for a moment longer, then let my head ease back against the pillow, staring up at the cracked ceiling tiles,the dark light fixture, and the ordinary, unremarkable details of a room that had, for now, become something like safety.
For the first time since the bridge, nothing required anything from me.
No running. No decisions. No counting exits or reading threats or holding everything together through sheer forward momentum.
Just here.
Just alive.
Just them, close and breathing, in the same room.
For now, that covered everything.
* * *
Two weeks.
The world had narrowed to four people, a beat-up vet clinic, and a fat orange cat who carried himself as if the apocalypse were beneath his dignity.
I healed slowly and painfully, each day a conscious effort to drag myself closer to being functional. My shoulder burned with every wrong move, and for the first few days, simply sitting upright demanded more determination than I cared to admit. Yet, the fever never came. The wound remained clean. And somehow, against what I’d privately considered pretty reasonable odds on that bridge—
I didn’t die.
Fiona kept me alive with a quiet competence that instilled confidence before she’d even spoken. Calm, precise, and utterly unintimidated by the circumstances, she worked with the clinic’s meager supplies as if she’d been doing emergency field medicine her whole life, rather than whatever she’d been doing before all this.
“You’re not dying,” she told me one afternoon, not even glancing up from re-wrapping my shoulder with efficient movements.
“Good to know,” I said.
“You don’t get to die after pulling that stunt on the bridge,” she added.
Hard to argue with that.
Lily stayed close throughout it all—quieter than usual, more watchful, but holding together better than I’d expected. The cat helped. Doc Fluffbutt had proven to be a surprisingly effective psychological intervention: an enormous orange animal with strong opinions and absolutely no intention of adjusting his behavior for something as trivial as the collapse of civilization.
“He likes me best,” Lily said one afternoon, scratching behind his ears with the focused dedication of someone who’d made it a personal mission.
