Panic pulled me back in.

My body had spent months clinging to this world, refusing to release its grip on everything it knew, and in the moment Everett fell, something fundamental snapped into alignment all at once. My soul and this body had been slowly merging for a year — two things becoming one, the way two rivers eventually stop having separate names — and fear for my son finished what time had quietly started. I was back. Fully, finally, completely back. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

I touched my face just to be certain. My fingers felt real against my skin — solid, warm, present. The air felt real. Everything around me was sharp and immediate in a way it hadn’t been in months, the world no longer filtered through glass or distance or the muffled unreality of being somewhere between living and not.

I had to find Lewis.

I reached for the tubes and monitors and pulled them free, my mind already full of him, already full of the twins. I swung my legs off the edge of the bed and they folded directly beneath me, my body giving way without ceremony. I hit the carpet before I could catch myself. Of course — months flat on my back, completely still, and my body had simply forgotten how to hold me upright. I sat on the floor for a moment and almost laughed at the indignity of it.

The room was one of the private suites the Hale pack kept reserved on the top floor of the hospital — quiet and clean, designed for the kind of long, uncertain stays that nobody plans for. Because of the risk of bedsores, Lewis had arranged occasional baths for me even during the months I was unconscious. The bathroom was soundproof. So while I climbed slowly and carefully into the tub and let the hot water work at my stiff, uncooperative legs, no one outside knew I was in there. Lewis was probably falling apart on the other side of that door, convinced I had vanished entirely. That thought sat uncomfortably in my chest the entire time.

When I finally pushed the bathroom door open, he was on his knees on the floor.

"Lewis."

He looked up. His eyes were red and raw, the kind of red that comes from a fear so large it bypassed everything and went straight to the body. Before I could take a single step toward him, he crossed the room and wrapped himself around me entirely — arms pulling me in like he was trying to hold all of me at once, like he was afraid that releasing any part of me would let me slip away again.

The warmth of him hit me first. Then his scent — that deep, familiar pull that I had been hovering near for months without ever being able to feel properly, always just out of reach, always on the wrong side of a barrier I couldn’t cross. Now I felt all of it, every bit of it, and something in my chest ached with how overwhelmingly good it was to simply be held.

"Riley." His voice broke on my name. "My Riley."

I hadn’t fully understood the chaos I’d caused. I had thought, emerging from the bathroom, that his reaction was simply joy — pure and straightforward. But holding him now, feeling the way his hands pressed into my waist with a force that bordered on painful, hearing the sound coming from him that he was making no effort to control, I began to understand the scope of what these last hours had cost him.

We were both crying and neither of us cared even slightly.

"Lewis. I’m back. I’m really back."

During those terrible hours of labor — the blood, the weakness, the moments when I hadn’t been sure I was going to make it through to the other side — I had been too lost and too broken to say anything proper to him, anything that carried the full weight of what I needed him to know. I was grateful now, more than I had language for, that the bond between us had held through all of it. His tears ran hot against my neck, and when I pulled back enough to look at his face, I saw something I had genuinely never seen before. Lewis, completely undone. Every wall he had ever constructed, every layer of control he wore as naturally as his own skin — gone. It broke my heart open in a way that also, somehow, felt like healing.

"You’re back," he kept saying, over and over, smoothing his hands across my hair, my face, my shoulders, as though he needed to verify every part of me. "That’s all that matters. You’re back."

I wiped his face gently and told him what had happened — Everett rolling off the bed, the terror of it arriving like a lightning strike, the way that single moment of pure fear had slammed me back into my own body with a completeness that months of slow merging hadn’t quite achieved. "I think the shock finished it," I said. "Made the bond complete. My body stopped fighting me." I looked at him. "Lewis — is it over? Is it really over?"

He smoothed my hair back from my face with both hands, his touch slow and deliberate. "I hope so. No one controls fate — not entirely. But you being here right now, Riley." He paused. "It’s New Year’s Day. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me."

I held onto his arm. "Then take me home. My legs are still unreliable — I’ll probably need a wheelchair for a while—"

He had already lifted me before the sentence was finished, standing with me in his arms with the ease of someone who had been waiting months for the chance to do exactly this. The darkness that had lived in his face for so long — the hollowed-out exhaustion, the grief held just barely in check — was simply gone. In its place was something I hadn’t seen in far too long.

"Let’s go," he said. "We’re going home."

The whole ride back I thought only about the twins. I had hovered near them for months in that strange in-between state, had reached toward their small hands with fingers they couldn’t feel, had watched them sleep and fuss and grow without being able to do a single thing about any of it. Soon — minutes from now — I would actually hold them.

When we walked through the door of the Hale residence, Jeffrey looked up from across the room and his composure came apart quietly and completely. "Riley’s back." He said it softly, almost to himself, like something he needed to say aloud before he could fully believe it. His eyes filled. "It’s so good to have you home. Come and see your children."

He was holding Everly. It was obvious, watching him over those few seconds, how thoroughly he had fallen for both babies during these months — but there was something extra soft in the way he cradled her specifically, something that had no performance in it. Everett was in his crib nearby, and when he fussed for attention Jeffrey would look at him with great seriousness and say, "A man does not cry for cuddles." I bit back a laugh. Everett was three months old. He had no concept of what a man was. He knew warm and cold, hungry and full, content and not.

Jeffrey placed Everly carefully into my arms.

She looked like me — the same shape to her face, the same eyes — but she carried a sweet dimple when she smiled that I couldn’t place anywhere in my memory. I asked Lewis where it came from.

Jeffrey answered after a brief silence. "Lewis’s mother had a dimple."

The room went quiet. I didn’t push it. What little I knew of her told me she had been someone vivid and beautiful — the kind of woman whose features leave their impression across generations, appearing in faces long after she herself was gone. Looking at Everly’s face, I believed it completely and without question.

Hearing my voice, Everett began to cry from his crib. My chest tightened immediately, the memory of him hitting the carpet earlier still raw and close. I crossed to him and lifted him up, holding him carefully. "Don’t cry. I’m here for you too. I’m here."

Both babies settled in my arms, warm and solid and absolutely real. Lewis stepped in close behind me and wrapped his arms around all three of us at once, his chin coming to rest gently against the top of my head.

"Riley," he said quietly. "Please don’t ever leave us again."