Page 68 of Coming Home

"Hey," I said. My voice was rough and unused.

"How are you feeling?"

"I can't see." The most obvious statement in the world. The hardest one to spit out.

"I know." Her fingers tightened on my arm. "The doctors told me. The surgery is Thursday. They said the surgical team is excellent, Ralph. They said there's a real chance."

Her voice was an anchor—rock-solid. But I knew her too well. I could hear the microscopic fractures underneath, the places where she was holding herself together by sheer willpower because she refused to break in front of me.

"How's your breathing?" I asked, remembering the way she had looked underwater. "After the pool."

"I'm fine."

"Emma."

"I'm fine, Ralph. I have a bruise on my shoulder, my lungs are clear, and I am fine. Don't you dare try to make this about me right now."

A ghost of a smile caught the corner of my mouth.

She stayed. Every single day. Her voice became the clock I lived by. In the dark, time has no markers; the machines beep at the exact same interval at noon as they do at midnight. But Emma had rhythms.

Morning Emma was quiet, arriving with the rich scent of coffee. She'd sit in the vinyl chair beside the bed and read absurd articles from her phone—celebrity gossip, restaurant reviews, a story about a cat in Portland terrorizing its owner. She read them in a light, melodic tone, painting the room with color I couldn't see.

In the afternoons, she brought Nadia, who filled the room with enough chaotic energy to power a small town. Nadia argued with the nurses about the quality of the hospital coffee and told me my institutional gown was "not my color."

"I can't see it anyway," I muttered.

"I can," Nadia fired back, her voice cracking slightly before she masked it with anger, "and I have standards for the men in this family."

But Evening Emma was the one that gutted me.

She would hold my hand and read to me from a thriller she'd bought at the gift shop. Neither of us cared about the plot. What mattered was the low, warm cadence of her voice as the night settled in, filling the void between the heart monitor's beeps. Sometimes she'd stop mid-sentence—a pause that lasted a beat too long. I'd tell her to keep going, and she'd clear her throat and continue. I knew she was wiping away tears, and she knew I knew, but we both played the part because it was the only way to survive the room.

Theo came on the second day. He sat in the chair, silent for a long time. For Theo, silence was a symptom of a crisis.

"I'm sorry, Ralph," he said, his voice unusually thick.

"Don't."

"I built a machine around you," he said. "This whole empire, the sponsorships, the brand—I built it around your body and your talent, and I never once stopped to ask if my brother was okay inside of it. I kept running the numbers on you like you were the best deal I ever made, and I—" His voice broke. "You're my brother."

"It wasn't your fault, Theo. I hid it. I looked you in the eye every single week and lied because I was too proud to admit I was breaking. That wasn't fair to you. No more lies."

"No more," Theo agreed, his hand finding mine and gripping it with a fierce, protective strength. "We'll figure this out. Whatever the outcome of Thursday. Together."

He stayed for hours, telling me about a get-well card Abbie had drawn—which apparently featured a stick figure that resembled a very tall banana—and how Emma had successfully intimidated the head nurse into letting her sleep in the room past visiting hours. I laughed. It pulled at the muscles in my chest, but it felt human.

Athena came later that evening, fighting a losing battle with her own tear ducts before she even cleared the threshold.

"I care about my brother," she sobbed, squeezing my hand until my knuckles ached. "I swear, Ralph, if you leave me, I will follow you into the afterlife and make it miserable."

"Now that," I said softly, "I actually believe. But someone has to take care of our mom."

It hadn't been easy to hide my blindness from her, but Athena was doing a good job of keeping her in the dark.

Nights were a different beast.

When the visitors left and the hallways fell silent, the dark stopped being an absence of light and became a physical presence. It projected everything I might never see again. The deep cerulean of the pool at dawn. The blinding gold of the California sun. The sharp scrunch of Athena's nose when she was pissed.