Page 37

In the dark room, my lungs draw in air like I’ve surfaced from underwater. The pillow border I constructed with such stern diplomacy has been knocked askew.

Marco leans against the headboard on top of the covers, wearing jeans but no shirt, his boots kicked off onto the floor as if he’d just come back from wherever he goes at these hours and flopped onto the comforter without bothering to get ready for bed. Faint light spills from a table lamp and catches a scar that curves across his left side. My eyes linger on this memento of the wound I stitched.

His disheveled hair falls messily across his forehead, almost obscuring the look in his eyes. He doesn’t appear startled, which means he was already awake. He probably watched my nightmare unfold.

I sit up, cover my face with my hands, and then begin a calming breathing exercise. In for four, hold for four, out for four. I picked up the tactic in med school back when my panic had sharper teeth and I still needed to learn how to appear unaffected.

The sheets are cool against my legs, and the room smells like cedar, soap, and the gym. Like Marco.

He says nothing, just stays still beside me. That simple act reassures me more than any words could.

“I dream about it at least twice a week.” My voice vibrates against my palms.

Even when I lower my hands and stare at the ceiling, he remains quiet. “I was there when Matteo died. They brought him to my ER, and I failed him both as his doctor and as his sister.”

My explanation comes out flat and uninflected, like I’m delivering lab results. But I can’t keep my tone together on the last few words, and a sob overwhelms my voice.

He moves then, his hand closing on my shoulder and drawing me toward his body in one unhurried motion. I relinquish control and allow him to tug me close until my face presses into the curve of his neck, where his pulse beats against my cheek. I relax into his warm skin, solid muscles, and the comforting rise and fall of his breathing.

The contact rips away a blockage behind my sternum, like a door held shut for too long finally coming off its hinges. He settles his arm around my shoulders, and I let his heartbeat calm me.

Nobody has cradled me like this since Matteo died.

But now, Marco carves out space, deliberately and without conditions, for me to fall apart.

He doesn’t try to fix the void or fill it or talk me back from the edge. He pulls me close, his thumb brushing one long, slow caress across my shoulder. The small gesture breaks the damn inside me.

I close my eyes.

The clinical labels won’t stick, not with the slow buzz his thumb sparked. Not with the warmth of his bare chest bleeding through my thin shirt. Not with his breath stirring my hair and the tingles now going amok on my scalp.

Heat builds low in my belly, and no amount of medical terminology can reclassify what I’m actually experiencing. I move against him, my cheek sliding from the curve of his neck to rest against his chest.

“I had this terrible feeling.” My voice sounds muffled against the fabric. “The week before it happened, he texted me a message that didn’t make any sense, but I was on a double shift with three critical patients, so I told myself I’d look closer at it on the weekend.”

The weekend came too late.

I pause and sniffle. Except for an increase in his heartbeat, Marco still doesn’t respond.

“I was tired and thought the message could wait.” My throat closes up. “If I had called him more often or paid him more attention or even suspected that he was involved with dangerous people, then…”

The guilt’s had two years to calcify, and it’s wedged under my sternum like a foreign body.

By this point in my tale, most people interrupt me with reassurances or insist I’m not to blame. Marco does neither. He just cradles me, and after a long moment, his voice comes from above my head, deep and rough with truth.

“When the charges first came in, I tried to fight them.”

I grow still against him.

“I hired lawyers with the money I had saved for five years. I sat in rooms and listened to men describe me as a cheat and a fraud. I told them the truth as I understood it then, that I’d never knowingly taken anything, that the only supplements I used came from my own trainer. I kept thinking that if I explained it clearly enough, they would understand.” He exhales. “They didn’t. And I couldn’t explain the one thing that mattered, because I didn’t understand it myself yet.”

His chest rises and falls under my cheek.

“There was a version of me before the disgrace who I believed in. But by the time the trial was over, the old me felt like someone I had read about instead of someone I’d been.”

I curl my fingers in the denim at his waist. For the first time in two years, I don’t feel as if I’m bearing my grief alone in a sterile, brightly lit room. In this darkness, we share our sadness.

I can’t pinpoint the moment the tension changes.