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“Let me prove to you that all I want is you. And our sons.”

The mention of them undoes me.

Not just the fact that he said our sons, like it’s the most natural thing in the world—but the way his voice shakes when he says it. Like he’s scared he won’t get the chance to earn that title. Like he doesn’t feel worthy of them.

Or me.

My throat burns as I finally turn my hand, palm to palm, fingers lacing with his like we’ve done it a thousand times—and maybe we have, in every way that matters.

“I’m scared,” I admit, the words ripped from someplace deep. “Because I want to believe you. So bad it hurts.”

His grip tightens, like maybe he needed that truth to breathe again. “Then let me be the one to stop hurting you.”

I bite my lip, hard, and nod once.

It’s not a promise.

But it’s a start.

And for the first time in weeks—maybe months—it feels like hope isn’t some far-off thing with wings and warnings.

Chapter Twenty-Two

FLETCH

I never thought routine could feel like grace.

But here we are—two weeks deep into this quiet rhythm we’ve built between hospital corridors and ranch fences, NICU monitors and midnight melodies. Mya’s hair smells like lavender and stubbornness when I help her into the wheelchair every morning. Her fingers still tremble a little when she holds Kingston or Kody, but there’s steel under the softness now. She’s healing. Slowly. Fiercely.

And somehow, she’s letting me be here to witness it.

We don’t talk much on the drive in anymore. Some mornings we hum along to whatever’s playing on the radio, and some mornings the silence is its own kind of comfort. I like the quiet. It’s less dangerous than words. Words can turn into confessions. Into apologies. Into admissions I’m not sure I have the right to speak yet.

But watching her through the NICU glass? Watching her press a kiss to each twin’s forehead like it’s the last one she’ll ever get? That’s a kind of poetry I can understand.

Today, Kingston’s eyes track her voice. Just barely, but enough to make Mya cry in that silent way she does now—like her heart’s too full and too fractured to figure out the difference.

“Hey, buddy,” I whisper, crouching beside the incubator, watching Kody’s chest rise in slow, careful rhythm. “You and your brother keep proving me wrong.”

Imani meets us just before we leave, clipboard in hand, her scrubs the color of fresh sage. She smiles—a soft, serious smile that makes my pulse skip a beat.

“Good news,” she says gently. “Kingston’s hit the weight milestone. He’s regulating his body temp without support and feeding well. If he maintains this for the next seventy-two hours, we’ll be prepping for discharge.”

I blink.

Mya’s hand tightens around mine like she needs confirmation this is real, like if she breathes too hard, it’ll all blow away.

“We’re not there yet,” Imani adds, reading us like an open book. “But we’re close.”

Close. Close is a sunrise peeking over a horizon we didn’t think we’d make it to. Close is hope with a heartbeat.

Later, while Mya curls up in the rocking chair next to Kingston’s incubator—her fingers tangled with his impossibly tiny ones—I sit by the window with my beat-up journal, the one I found in my guitar case the day Mya woke up.

I don’t usually write lyrics in hospitals.

But something about this place—about them—undoes me enough to try.

I scribble down the words slowly, carefully, like if I rush them, I’ll miss something sacred: