Page 64 of Coming Home

"If you don't call Theo tonight and tell him the truth," I said, my voice hardening with a chilling certainty, "I'll call him myself."

His expression instantly turned to stone. "Don't interfere with my life, Emma."

"Then fix it yourself."

"You don't understand the stakes."

"I understand them perfectly," I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand. "I spent years pretending my body wasn't failing. I trained through a disease that was destroying my organs. I pushed, and I lied, and I masked the pain until my body collapsed under the weight of my own arrogance and I lost everything. My career, my identity, my family—I sacrificed it all because I was too proud to ask for help. And I swear to God, Ralph, I will not stand here and watch the man I love commit the exact same suicide."

He looked at me for one long, agonizing beat. He walked past me. He crossed the living room, opened the front door, and stepped out into the humid night.

I stood alone in the center of the kitchen, his medical papers still clutched so tightly in my fist that the pages trembled in the still air.

Outside, the throaty roar of his truck engine started up. The white beams of his headlights swept across the kitchen wall as he backed down the driveway. Then, the sound slowly bled into the distance, leaving the house empty—and leaving me standing there with the familiar realization that loving someone passionately doesn't give you the power to save them from themselves.

It just gives you a front-row seat to the crash.

CHAPTER 21

Emma

He drove.

That realization sent me flying out the front door, snapping me from my trance.

He had climbed behind the wheel of a heavy truck and driven blindly into the dark because I'd pushed too hard. I had backed him into a corner, and he had done exactly what cornered, terrified animals do. He ran.

Standing on the porch with the wind whipping my hair across my face, I called him four times. Voicemail.

Every single time. His recorded voice filled my ear, the greeting he'd set down on some ordinary day when nothing was wrong, nothing like the man who had walked out on me ten minutes ago with wet eyes and white-knuckled fists.

Desperate, I called Theo. He picked up on the second ring, the background noise of his office muffled.

"Is Ralph with you?" I demanded, my breath hitching.

"No. Em? What's wrong? You sound⁠—"

"We had a fight. A horrible fight, Theo, and he left. He's driving."

There was a long, loaded pause on the other end. Theo didn't know about the tumor. Ralph hadn't shared his diagnosis with his best friend, and every instinct screamed that I couldn't be the one to tell him now—not like this, not over a frantic phone call while Ralph was somewhere on a chaotic California freeway with fading eyesight and a head full of the worst conversation of his life.

"He's upset," I choked out, trying to steady my voice. "I said some things I shouldn't have. He walked out. I'm just so worried, Theo."

"I'll try to call his personal line," Theo said, his voice instantly tightening with executive urgency. "Where would he go, Em?"

"The pool." The answer came from somewhere deep within my chest, instinctual. When Ralph was bleeding, he went to the water. Always. He had done it since he was nine years old, back when a borrowed pair of goggles was the only thin barrier standing between him and a world that didn't make a lick of sense. "Coach Vance's facility."

"I'll head that way. Stay at the house in case he circles back."

But I couldn't stay. The house was too quiet, too vast, and I kept seeing him behind the wheel, his vision strobing, and I couldn't make the image stop.

I grabbed a denim jacket, summoned a car, and fed the driver the address to the high-performance training center.

The ride took twenty-two agonizing minutes through light evening traffic. I spent every second of it staring down at my screen, practically begging it to illuminate with his name. It remained stubbornly black. Outside the window, the city slid past in a blur of wet asphalt and red taillights, smeared by an earlier drizzle.

Guilt hit me on the ride over: If something happens to him tonight, it's because I pushed. Because I found his deepest vulnerability and weaponized it instead of holding it gently. Because I did to him the exact thing he never did to me.

When Ralph had found me at my lowest, shivering on a porch, he had led with endless, sheltering patience. But when I found him at his worst, I had led with a furious hurricane.