“Hey, Port,” she near-whispered.
“Hey, Starboard,” I answered automatically. We’d never told anyone about those nicknames. Ever. So this was either one hell of a dream…or she was real.
In the time it took me to cross the room to her, every memory crashed through me. Building sand castles as kids, laughing on the beach, learning to sail. Our first kiss, our first I love yous. The fight. The crash. The blue tinge to her skin when I pulled her out of the water. The sound of her parents screaming at the doctors for suggesting organ donation. My broken voice begging her to come back to me. Making promises to her to take it all back and make it right, to God, to anyone who had the power to bring her soul back to her body. Five years of agony erupted as I fell to the chair next to her bed.
“You’re really here,” I whispered, taking her hand. She squeezed it back, and I cracked, my soul bleeding.
“I’m really here.”
My best friend hadn’t lost her southern accent.
I collapsed forward, my head landing in her lap, and she ran her fingers through my hair like she hadn’t been gone the last five years. I was six, and ten, and eighteen, and twenty-three years old all in one moment.
“I’m really here,” she repeated softly.
I let it overpower me, the gift I’d been given. She was back. She would live.
Nothing else mattered.
“Explain,” I said to the crowd of family in the waiting room a few hours later, once she’d fallen back to sleep. Watching her eyes close, surrender to sleep, scared the shit out of me. It was too close to what she’d looked like before.
“Why don’t we do this in private, Gray?” Mrs. Bowden suggested.
Miranda handed the baby to her husband and came with us into an empty room. It was set up like Grace’s, and I started pacing between the wall and the foot of the bed. “Explain,” I repeated.
“The stem cells from Amberly,” Miranda offered. “We’d contacted the trial program at the University of Texas at the beginning of the pregnancy, and when Amberly’s cells were a match, they agreed to let Grace into the clinical trial. She’s their first success.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?” God, I needed a run, or a punching bag, or something, anything to let this energy out. I felt like a caged tiger, desperate to rip something to shreds, confined to a barred cage.
“We didn’t want to get your hopes up,” Mrs. Bowden answered.
“Okay, I’ll give you that. But when she woke up? You didn’t think I had a right to know about that? Three weeks!” They both stepped back as I pointed at them.
Miranda’s gaze flickered to her mom before coming back to me. “Her waking has been gradual,” she explained. “At first it was only a half hour at a time, if that. She didn’t speak right away, either. That took nearly a week. She still barely gets through sentences.”
“I noticed.” She’d had to carefully think through everything she said before she said it. It was almost a perfect parallel to when I’d learned to read, and she’d sat patiently by my side. Now it was my turn.
“She’s still working on basic tasks. She can’t walk, or even stand for more than a few seconds.” Miranda started to fidget with her hands. Family trait.
“And what the hell does this have to do with keeping me in the dark?”
“We didn’t know the extent of her damage, if she’d remember anything, or if she’d be mentally sound, Gray. We didn’t want to get your hopes up until we knew something, and the minute she started speaking…” She glanced back at her mom.
“What?” I shouted.
They both flinched. “She wanted us to wait. She said that she needed more time before she could see you. She didn’t want you to see her that weak.”