Kristen watched her friend walk from the room. When Sloan was gone, Kristen looked up at me with those brown eyes, one hand tangled in mine and the other on my chest, and I was whole just looking at her.
This crisis laid everything bare.
I’d found my person.
She was the foundation. She was the thing that all other things are built on. Everything was secondary to being with her. It didn’t matter where I worked or if I liked my job, where I lived or how many kids I had. My happiness, my sanity, my well-being—it all started with her. And now that I knew that, I didn’t want to just be her boyfriend—I wanted everything. I wanted her to be my wife. I wanted to wake up to her every day for the rest of my life.
We needed to talk. Not now. It wasn’t the right place or time. But we needed to talk.
“You can go in now.” A nurse broke into my thoughts.
Kristen sat up and gave my arm a squeeze. “Want me to go in with you?”
“No. Sloan will want to see him again. I’ll be fine.” I stood.
Brandon’s parents had gone home to deal with their dogs and to take showers. Only Brandon’s sister, Claudia, remained in the waiting room. She’d already gone in twice over the last two hours and was sleeping on a bench.
The nurse buzzed me into the ICU.
I peered into dim open hospital rooms as we made our way down the hall, the smell of antiseptic swirling around me as I walked.
We stopped at room 214.
His room was small. I could see why they limited it to two visitors at a time.
Like the other rooms, his was dimmed for the late hour. Brandon lay on his back. Hands at his sides, a pulse oximeter on the index finger of his right hand. His head was bound with thick white gauze, his left leg elevated in a sling and bandaged. He wore a ventilator over his face. Wires snaked from his chest under his hospital gown.
The gentle, quiet beep of a heart monitor and the in and out of the ventilator were the only sounds in the room. His cheek was purple and swollen, the bruising I’d witnessed on the scene blooming.
I just stood there, like I was looking at a mess too big to clean up and I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know what to do. I felt frozen. This was a soldier in Iraq. A hunter. A strong and capable man.
And now he was broken.
Sloan slipped into the room behind me and slid into one of the bedside chairs, gathering up his hand. My legs unlocked and I took her lead, sitting in the chair next to her.
She looked at him, her chin quivering. Her hair was up in a loose bun, crooked and sloppy. Her face, blotchy and red. “They say he can hear us. We should talk to him, Josh.”
I cleared my throat and leaned forward. “Hey, buddy. You look like shit, man.”
Sloan did a laugh-cry. Then she put her other hand over his. “Your whole family was here today, babe. You won’t ever be here alone, okay? Someone will always be in the waiting room for you. I’m not going to leave you. I can’t be in here all the time, but I’ll be just outside.”
I wondered why someone wasn’t allowed to stay with him. When the fifteen minutes was up and the nurse came to get us, Sloan went back to the waiting room and I made my way to the nurses’ station. I summoned my most convincing smile, the one that seemed to work on Kristen, and I walked up to the counter.
The middle-aged nurse manning the station looked up, eyed my firefighter badge, and gave me a warm grin. “Well, hello. What can I do for you, young man?”
I was grateful for my profession at the moment. Nobody was ever unhappy to see a fireman.
I put a thumb over my shoulder. “Yeah, I was just visiting my buddy, Brandon, in room 214.” I looked over at the room and came back with a smile that I hoped reached my eyes. “I couldn’t help but notice a lot of the other rooms had visitors that looked like they’d kind of set up camp. Is there any way his fiancée can just stay with him? He’d really like that.”
My sister Amber was a nurse, and I knew that on the hospital floor, the