Page 104
MYA
There’s a strange kind of comfort in the whirr of NICU machines—steady, rhythmic, reliable. Unlike the rest of my life, which feels like it’s been shattered and pieced back together with glue that hasn’t quite dried.
Every day starts the same. Fletch wheels me through the hospital doors like he’s afraid I might disappear if he lets go. I’m not that fragile—I keep telling him that—but he keeps doing it anyway. Not because I need him to.
But because he needs to.
I watch the boys through the glass. Their tiny bodies wrapped up in wires and blankets, barely bigger than a loaf of bread. It’s been two weeks since I got discharged, and they’re still in their incubators, still fighting, still growing. The nurses say they’re doing well. Meeting milestones. Breathing better. Feeding more. That if everything goes right, we’ll bring them home by the time they hit 38 weeks.
It sounds so far away. And yet… I’m clinging to it like a lifeline.
“You okay?” Fletch asks me one morning, voice quiet, eyes soft. Always soft, lately. Like he’s afraid his sharp edges might cut me open again.
I nod, even though I’m not. “I’m fine.”
It’s the lie I’ve perfected since waking up.
Because if I say I’m not okay, it opens a door I’m not ready to walk through. Not when the boys are still here. Not when I’m afraid to even go to sleep in case I wake up and it’s all gone.
Back on the ranch, life resumes. Slower than I want it to.
“Take it easy,” Reese says for the hundredth time, arms crossed, her glare sharp enough to draw blood. “You just got out of the hospital. You need to rest.”
I shoot her a look as I sit down in front of my laptop and start answering emails for the band’s tour rollout. “If I rest any harder, I’ll fall into another coma. No thanks.”
“Mya.”
“No,” I snap, then soften my tone because I know she means well. “I love you, but if I don’t keep busy, I’ll lose my goddamn mind. I need something to hold onto, Reese. I need to feel like me again.”
She studies me for a beat. “Fine. But if you collapse, I’m not letting you near your phone for a week.”
Deal.
The band’s been holed up in the studio for days. Carson’s voice raw. Benji in a manic writing spiral. Fletch quieter than usual, but present. So, so present.
They said it started while I was under. That they couldn’t stop writing. That the words poured out of them like a flood they’d been holding back. Songs about love and loss and everything in between. Even Fletch—my drummer who always hid behind the beat—is writing lyrics now.
When he lets me read one of his songs, my throat closes.
It’s about me.
About the silence and the waiting and the guilt that eats him alive.
“I couldn’t save you,” he tells me quietly, voice cracking. “But I stayed. Every day. Because I needed you to know I was here when you woke up.”
I can’t speak. Just take his hand and press it to my heart.
He was always here.
It’s not perfect. Some nights, I still wake up screaming. Some days, I can’t look in the mirror without flinching at the shadows under my eyes. But I show up. At the NICU. At my laptop. In the studio when they ask for input.
Because the only way out is through. And I’m learning to live again, one deep breath at a time.
One email. One baby blanket. One unfinished lyric scribbled in the margins of a hospital brochure.
Because life doesn’t stop when everything breaks.
It rebuilds itself.
