Page 69 of Coming Home

Theo's grin across a boardroom table.

And Emma. Always Emma. The specific way her eyes caught the light. The flush that rose along her neck when she was flustered. The tiny furrow between her brows over takeout containers. The absolute terror and beauty of her face the day I first kissed her on the beach.

The grief of losing that was an ache no medication could touch.

The night before the surgery, the hospital room felt smaller, the mechanical beeps louder. The nurses had finished their rounds, leaving us in a heavy, fragile silence.

Emma shifted on the edge of the mattress, the sheets rustling. I felt the weight of her body shift closer, her warmth radiating through the thin cotton of my gown.

"Ralph," she whispered, her voice thick with an emotion she'd been suppressing all day.

"I'm here, Em."

She didn't just take my hand this time. She climbed onto the narrow bed with me, carefully avoiding the IV lines, and slid her arms around my neck. Her chest pressed against mine, and I could feel the frantic, ragged hitch of her breathing.

Then, she began to worship me.

It was the same way I had held her when she was broken, the same desperate, reverent touch I had used to piece her back together on my bed. Her small hands slid up my neck, framing my jaw, her thumbs tracing my cheekbones.

"Your face," she whispered, her lips brushing against my forehead, breathing me in. "I love your forehead, Ralph. I love the way it wrinkles when you're trying to figure out a tough turn. I love your jaw. I love the roughness of it right now."

She leaned down, kissing the closed, useless lids of my eyes. She didn't pull away. She left her lips there, tasting the salt of the tears that had finally slipped past my guard. She kissed them away slowly, absorbing my grief into herself.

"I love your broad shoulders," she murmured, her hands tracking down to my chest, pressing flat against my heartbeat. "I love every single inch of you. Your collarbone. Your ribs. Your hands—these beautiful hands that pulled me out of the dark. There isn't a single part of you that I don't worship, Ralph. Not one."

A sound tore out of me—a sound I didn't recognize, stripped of pride. The armor I had worn for years, the strong-man persona I'd maintained for my family, crumbled into nothing. I wrapped my arms around her waist, burying my face in the crook of her neck, and I wept. Truly wept. The tears soaked into her shirt, born from the fear of a future I couldn't see and the overwhelming weight of the love she was pouring into me.

Emma didn't tell me to be strong. She just held me tighter, her own tears wet against my temple, her body trembling against mine as we let the heartbreak wash over us.

"I'm right here," she choked out, her lips finding mine in a kiss that felt like a promise she was pressing into me. "I'm not going anywhere. If this is the dark, then we're in it together."

An hour later, when our breathing had finally quieted, Emma took my hand and told me we were going for a walk.

She guided me through the maze of the hospital, narrating every turn with a steadiness I knew she was holding together for me. "Left here. Moving to carpet now. Double doors ahead, I've got them." Her grip never loosened.

Then the air changed. The sterile heat dropped away, replaced by a cool breeze, the distant hum of traffic, and the scent of damp earth and grass. The garden.

She guided me onto a concrete bench and sat close, her thigh pressed firmly against mine.

I took a deep breath of the night air. It tasted like freedom and fear.

"My only real regret," I said, my voice cutting through the quiet, "would be never seeing your face again."

She didn't answer right away. Instead, she took my right hand, lifted it, and pressed my open palm flat against her cheek.

"Feel," she whispered.

I traced her features with my fingertips. Slowly. The way a man reads a map in the dark, treating every line like vital terrain. Her forehead was smooth and warm. The elegant arch of her eyebrows. The straight slope of her nose. Her cheekbones, high and sharp. And her lips—full, soft, and trembling under my thumb.

"I'm going to be right here when you open your eyes," she said, her voice fierce. "And I'm going to be right here every day after that. If the vision doesn't come back, I'll describe every single sunset until you beg me to shut up."

I let out a rough, wet laugh. "That's a hell of a lot of sunsets."

"I'm applying for the lifetime position, Ralph."

"Are you proposing to me, Emma?"

"What if I am?"