Page 42 of What We Become

“Work, Milo.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

He goes back to watching an empty driveway. I go back to the nightmare rectangle.

TEN

MICAH

“If you look at that monitor one more time, I’m biting you.”

My head stops turning halfway to the screen.

Sage’s eyes are still closed. She’s curled on her side beneath Milo’s cashmere blanket, one bandaged wrist tucked under her chin and Milo Number Two wedged against her chest. The oxygen came off after dinner. Now there’s nothing helping her breathe except her own lungs.

Four nights ago, she was gray beneath the chemical burns. Every breath scraped. Every number on the helicopter monitor fell while I sat there useless and listened to the medic say things like maximum flow and neurological damage.

So I risk the bite and check her monitor, needing to see that number for my own comfort. Oxygen at ninety-six. Good.

“I saw that,” she murmurs.

“Your eyes are closed.”

“I can feel your worrying. You do it with your whole personality.” Her mouth tips at one corner.

“Guilty,” I say. “You gonna bite me now? Give me a matching scar on the other arm?”

“Maybe.” Her eyes open. Gray and tired and sharper than they have any right to be after everything her body’s been through. Her gaze moves over my forearm, where the scars from the night we met her live.

The knife left a clean line. Her teeth left something messier, and I’ve never admitted to a single person that I checked it every day that first week—not for infection. To see if it was scarring. If her mark would linger.

She pats the mattress beside her. “Come here.”

I don’t move. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Micah.”

“Your rib⁠—”

“Is cracked because you kept my heart beating.” She says it plainly, like she’s telling me the time. “Come here.”

There’s no version of this where I win the argument, and I don’t want one. I get up and toe off my boots, easing onto the mattress carefully—one knee, one hip, the slow lower of my shoulder to the pillow. She watches the whole production with open amusement.

“You’re very dramatic,” she murmurs. “It’s a bed, not a minefield.”

“Feels like a minefield.”

Then she arranges me. There’s no other word for it. She pulls my arm under her head, tucks her back against my chest with Milo Number Two hugged to hers, and drapes my free hand over her waist, wriggling until she’s close enough and comfortable.

“There,” she says.

“There?”

“Now you can feel it.” She lifts my hand and presses my palm flat against her ribcage—above the break, below the bandage. “In. Out. All by myself. No more machines. Just me. Breathing all by myself.”

Her ribs expand under my hand. Contract. Expand.

My throat closes, and it hurts to swallow.