“Weak? I held her in my arms, half dead until they could get to us. I have rotated her for bedsores, changed out her catheter bag, checked IV fluids and feeding tubes for five years! I deserved to be told, and you know it!”
Miranda nodded, but it didn’t soothe the ticking time bomb approaching detonation in my chest. “Three weeks. I’ve never gone more than three weeks without seeing her…” Everything in me went deadly still, and my eyes locked onto Miranda’s. “You knew. When you told me to live my life, to soak in my sunshine, to not come until October. You knew this was the plan.”
“Yes,” she admitted softly, and had the sense to look away. “We didn’t know the trial would do anything. She’s really and truly a miracle, Gray. Our Hail Mary.”
“Full of Grace,” I whispered to myself.
Mrs. Bowden stepped in. “The team came here from the University, and they’ve been kind enough to let us stay here. We’ll go to Texas in a month for tests, of course, but their doctors are constantly flitting around.”
“How long will she be in the hospital?”
“That’s up to the doctors.”
I nodded, trying to process everything without losing my shit.
“How long can you stay?” Miranda asked.
Reality split again. I’d spent so long praying for her to wake up, I’d never considered what would happen after she did. “I’m on a four-day.”
“Did you happen to bring Samantha with you?” Mrs. Bowden asked.
My head snapped toward her. Sam. I closed my eyes for a second and let the thought of her rush through me, calming everything just enough to breathe.
The consequences of the miracle in front of me unfurled, hitting me harder than the fake-terrorist during SERE school. Sam. My Samantha.
Grace needs you.
Suddenly there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room, or the world.
“Gray?” Mrs. Bowden prodded.
“No, I didn’t bring her.” She was at home, with my study guides, my helicopter, my friends…my heart. And Grace was here. Fuck. I tried to silence the screaming in my head long enough to form a coherent sentence. “Does Grace know? About Sam?”
Miranda’s eyes filled with sympathy. “No. None of us have breathed a word of it to her.”
Mrs. Bowden touched my arm lightly. “We thought it best to let her be happy. We don’t know how she’ll react, what the stress might do to her. She knows that you’re here every chance that you get, but that’s all. We’d…we’d like you to let her heal before, well, anything.”
“You’d like me to lie? Or you’d like me to conveniently forget that I have a girlfriend at home in Alabama?” I growled, nausea rolling in my stomach.
“No,” Miranda shook her head at her mother. “No, Gray, we don’t. We just need to figure out what she assumes about now—what she needs. Telling her about Sam, that’s your choice. What you choose to do now that she’s awake—well, that’s your choice, too.”
I nodded once, then pushed past them to the door and through it. I ignored my name being called from the waiting room, from the hall behind me, from the person standing in the hall. The door swung open in front of me as I entered the stairwell and then hammered my way down the eight flights.
Sam. Grace.
My future. My past?
Everything I’d ever wanted had suddenly appeared, but I couldn’t have it all. I had to choose between the Grayson I was five years ago, the one who’d loved Grace with every heartbeat, and the one I was now, who’d fallen for Sam so completely that she was as crucial as oxygen.