I couldn’t control any of it. Some force I didn’t understand seized me and dragged me forward without warning, pulling me past Lewis so quickly it stirred his hair as I passed. Everyone’s attention was fixed on Everett, but Lewis stilled. He turned, slowly, in the direction I was being pulled away — not looking at anything specific, just turning, the way you turn when something fundamental shifts in the air around you and your body registers it before your mind does.

"Riley?"

Nothing answered him. Everett sensed it first, his tiny eyes scanning the room with the alert, searching expression that newborns aren’t supposed to have but sometimes do — as though they arrived already knowing things the rest of us have forgotten. When it became clear I was no longer there, both babies began to cry. Not the soft, manageable fussing kind. The deep kind, the inconsolable kind that fills every corner of a room and presses against your chest like something trying to get in.

Lewis went pale. Something in him understood before his mind had the language for it. He had spent so long with my presence moving around him — unseen but felt, constant as weather — that the absence of it struck him physically, like a cold draft cutting through a warm room without any window being opened. He reached into his pocket, found his lighter, and held the flame up in the center of the room. Still. Unwavering. He watched it the way a person watches something they are terrified to see go out.

Every time before, I had always come to blow it out.

Tonight, I didn’t.

"Riley, are you still here?" His voice cracked on the last word, the fracture small but complete. He turned slowly, scanning every corner of the room with the careful desperation of someone who knew what he was looking for and was already dreading not finding it. "Riley, don’t scare me. Where are you?"

The babies’ cries filled the silence and kept filling it, relentless and raw. Lewis’s face had gone the color of ash. He stood there another moment — long enough to be certain, long enough for the certainty to cost him something — and then shoved the door open and ran out into the dark.

The snow was coming down hard outside, the kind of heavy, driving snowfall that turned the world into a white blur and swallowed sound. Wind cut across the yard in sharp, howling bursts, pulling at everything it touched. Lewis ran into it without stopping for a coat, calling her name into the storm, until his feet went out from under him on the ice and he went down hard into a snowbank. He pulled himself upright without pausing and kept going, the cold not registering as something that mattered.

Theo ran after him, alarm written clearly across his face. "Mr. Lewis, what’s wrong? What’s happened?"

Lewis didn’t answer. He reached his car, got in, and had the engine running before Theo had fully processed what was happening. Theo barely made it into the passenger seat before the car was already moving, accelerating through the storm at a speed that made his hands find the door handle without conscious thought. The hospital. Lewis had to get to the hospital — because the alternative, the thought that she had stopped breathing somewhere in that room while he wasn’t there, was something his body physically couldn’t hold.

He pulled up to the entrance and stopped. And sat there. The engine idled. He couldn’t make himself get out, couldn’t make himself walk through those doors and receive whatever was waiting on the other side of them.

Theo watched him for a moment, then spoke quietly, carefully. "Mr. Lewis... do you think she’ll be okay? The hospital hasn’t called yet. No news might mean—"

"I don’t know." Lewis’s hands hadn’t moved from the steering wheel. His knuckles were pale against it.

Then the phone rang.

Lewis stared at it as though it were something that had appeared without explanation. The sound of it filled the car. Theo watched his face.

"Mr. Lewis." Theo’s voice was gentle but steady. "Maybe I should answer it. But whatever the news is — even if it’s the worst — you should go in. You should see her. You shouldn’t have any regrets. Not again."

Lewis heard the last two words land exactly where Theo intended them to. He remembered — he would always remember — how she had died alone once before, in the cold, while he wasn’t there. He had carried that ever since, in the particular way you carry something that doesn’t get lighter no matter how much time passes. He looked at the ringing phone. He looked at the hospital entrance. He sat with it for one more breath.

Then he made his decision. "Let’s go in."

He opened the door and stepped out, and his legs buckled immediately, the strength going out of them without warning. Theo caught him before he hit the ground, both hands steady, holding him upright until Lewis found his footing again. On the surface, Lewis looked composed — jaw set, expression controlled. He wasn’t. Something inside him had gone completely hollow, scraped clean by too many months of this particular kind of waiting and fearing and losing.

The hallway inside was busy, staff moving quickly in both directions with the contained urgency of a floor that had something to manage. Lewis braced himself with the full weight of what he had already decided he was walking into, what he had already begun to prepare himself to face.

The head nurse reached him first, her expression carrying the careful neutrality of someone delivering information they haven’t yet decided how to frame. "Mr. Hale, we have a serious situation."

Theo kept a hand on Lewis’s arm. Lewis’s voice came out hoarse. "Is my wife — is she already—"

"Mrs. Hale has disappeared."

Lewis stared at her. The words didn’t immediately arrange themselves into anything coherent. "What do you mean, disappeared?"

"Half an hour ago everything was completely normal — vitals stable, monitors reading as expected. But just now, when the nurse came to check, her bed was empty. We’re searching the entire floor."

Lewis and Theo looked at each other across a silence that held too many possibilities. Had she woken up on her own — disoriented, confused, wandered somewhere? Or had someone taken her, moved her, used the chaos of the storm as cover? A colder and uglier fear moved through him, dragging up images he had spent months working to bury — the faces of people who had already taken too much from him, who had already proven they would reach for whatever was left.

"Pull the surveillance footage," he said. "Now. Every camera on this floor."

He walked to the room anyway, needing to see it himself regardless of what the footage showed. The bed was empty, the sheets still carrying the impression of her. The monitors were silent, the machines unplugged or idle, the room holding the specific stillness of a space recently and suddenly vacated. Lewis stood in the center of it and didn’t move for a long moment, looking at the bed, at the pillow, at the small indentations that proved she had been here not long ago.

Every time she slipped away, it cost him something he couldn’t name or recover. He was so tired. His face was still young but his eyes had lived through decades of grief compressed into a single year, and it showed in them plainly — the particular exhaustion of someone who has been afraid for too long without relief.

"If you’re gone," he said quietly, to no one, to the empty air, to whatever part of her might still be somewhere in this room. "Take me with you."

The words settled into the silence and stayed there.

Then the bathroom door creaked open.

And a voice — soft, uncertain, unmistakably and entirely real — came through it.

"Lewis..."