Page 60 of What Remains

Seth sat awake near the fire, shoulders slightly hunched, hands clasped, staring into the dying embers as though they might offer him something.

She watched him for a long moment.

He looked tired, not physically. She'd seen that look before: on soldiers, on trauma surgeons at the end of impossible shifts, on husbands signing paperwork to stop life support. People who kept moving because stopping meant feeling everything they'd been outruning.

She knew that look intimately. She wore it herself.

Six months ago, her biggest worry had been a grant deadline. She'd stayed up late in a clean and quiet house, stressing over data. Now, she was awake on the concrete floor of a fire station, sleeping on mattresses that belonged to dead men, watching not so distant strangers breathe in the dark. It hadn't been a slow decline; it had been a fall from a cliff. And now, the only thing that mattered was counting the heartbeats around her until morning.

Her gaze drifted around the room again, settling on each sleeping form in turn.

These people— She had trusted them with her daughter's life.

The realization settled over her quietly, without fanfare. She hadn't meant to. It had happened in moments she hadn't kept track of. Jay patiently explaining their route on a map, his caution a steady presence. Cara chattering about her childhood, her easy laughter filling a silence Josie hadn't known how to break. It was a trust built not on words but on the small, steady accumulation of care.

They weren't just surviving. They were trying to remain human, and that felt almost impossible now.

Her eyes returned to Seth.

He remained the hardest one to read. Reserved, guarded—every conversation with him carried the careful quality of approaching something wounded. He never said more than necessary, never lingered, never smiled unless Layla accidentally coaxed one out of him.

But she'd noticed the little things.

Yesterday, he'd quietly handed Layla the last packet of crackers, feigning disinterest. He'd said, "We're taking you all the way," with no hesitation, no discussion—just certainty, offered like it cost him nothing when she knew it cost him plenty.

She hadn't asked why. She didn't need to.

He carried someone with him—a wife, children. She'd caught him staring at Layla once when he thought no one was looking, and the expression in his eyes wasn't pity. It was a raw, familiar grief she understood down to her bones, the kind you learned to hide behind a guarded stare.

Loss recognized loss.

She'd never asked. It wasn't her place, and besides—look around. The apocalypse had turned them all into walking memorials. Each person carried someone they couldn't stop remembering; they all had ghosts. Some simply managed the pretending better.

Her hand settled instinctively against Layla's back, rising and falling with each small breath.

Warm. Alive. Still here.

Everything else came second. Layla was the reason she got out of bed each morning, the reason she'd kept driving after losing Mark, the reason she'd rationed food her own body desperately needed, the reason she'd kept breathing when every part of her had wanted to collapse beside her husband's body on that balcony and never get back up.

Layla was enough. She had to be.

Because if Josie ever lost her⁠—

Her breath caught. No. The thought was a physical thing, a hand closing around her windpipe. She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the image away before it could form, before it could take root.

Instead, she thought of the ranch. She had to.

She closed her eyes, trying to conjure the scent of hay instead of stale smoke. Home. The image was so clear it ached: the wraparound porch, her mother's unruly flower beds. She could almost feel the worn wood of the porch swing where she'd studied anatomy, her father's voice grumbling about her books. She pictured him now, wrapping Layla in one of his enormous bear hugs, and the need for it to be real was a physical weight in her chest. She just had to believe they were still there, waiting.

She wanted to believe it so badly it physically hurt.

But beneath the hope, a dread coiled in her stomach. Months had passed without contact. She knew the odds. She remembered a young man's parents in a surgical waiting room, refusing to hear the statistics, insisting their son was different. She had wanted to believe with them, but the numbers were cold and unrelenting. A miracle had not come.

Now she stood in their place, making the same impossible promises to herself.

Her throat tightened.

Please be alive.