They had moved Amara while he was gone. Her own room now quieter than the delivery ward, smaller, with a window that showed the dark and early hours of the morning pressing against the glass.
The machines had come with her, arranged beside the bed with their steady blinking green, their rhythmic beeping that Julian had already learned to read like a language. Steady. Stable. Here.
She looked smaller in the bed than she had before all of this.
Or maybe he just saw her differently now. Maybe after everything the night had shown him, the cardiac arrest, the flat line, the terrible minutes before the pulse returned, he saw her with the specific tenderness of someone who had almost lost a thing and now could not look at it without feeling the outline of that almost.
He sat down beside her. Pulled the chair close. Took her hand.
