The door opened.
Rowan.
The room was small and white and humming with the low, persistent chorus of machines that measure life in numbers and beeps. An oxygen mask covered the lower half of his face – clear plastic, fogged slightly with each shallow breath. His skin was gray in a way I’d never seen on a living person. Not pale. Not wan. Gray. The color of ash. The color of someone whose body was fighting a war on two fronts and losing on both.
I stopped in the doorway. My legs had received a countermand from somewhere deep in my nervous system – a refusal, primal and absolute, to move closer to this image, as if distance could protect me from the reality of it.
But distance was a luxury I’d run out of.
I walked to his bedside. The chair beside the bed was plastic, institutional, the kind of chair designed for function rather than comfort, because comfort is not what hospitals traffic in. I sat. My hand found his – lying on the white sheet like something washed ashore, thin and still and warm only because the machines were keeping him warm.
“Rowan.” A whisper. His name in my mouth tasted like childhood, like safety, like every morning he’d made me breakfast and every night he’d checked the locks and every argument we’d had that meant nothing because underneath it all was the immovable fact that we were each other’s last remaining proof that our family had existed.
His eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell in the shallow, mechanical rhythm of a body operating on borrowed time. For a terrible, elongated moment – a moment that contained an entire lifetime of dread – I thought he couldn’t hear me. I thought I was too late. I thought the poison had done what it came to do, and the man in this bed was only the shape of my brother, emptied of everything that made him Rowan.
Then his eyelids moved. A flutter. The slow, effortful unfurling of consciousness returning to a body that had been trying to leave.
“Marlowe.” My name, barely audible beneath the oxygen mask. Barely a breath. But mine.
The tears came. Not the controlled, dignified tears of the movies. The ugly kind. The kind that distort your face and steal your voice and make sounds that aren’t words and aren’t sobs but some primitive vocalization that humans have been making since the first sibling held the hand of the second and understood that loss was real.
“Rowan.” I gripped his hand. Gently – the doctor had said gently – but with everything I had. As if my grip could function as an anchor, as if holding tight enough could tether him to this side of whatever threshold he was approaching. “What happened? How did this happen?”
His eyes – glassy, unfocused, struggling to hold mine – carried something I recognized from the deepest, most protected part of our shared history: the look he gave me the night our parents died. Not fear. Not pain. Apology. As if whatever had happened to him was somehow his fault, somehow a failure of the protection he’d spent his whole life trying to provide.
“Don’t cry,” he whispered. The words cost him something – I could see the effort in his jaw, in the way his throat worked beneath the mask’s elastic. “I’m fine.”
“You are not fine.” My voice cracked open and the anger poured through the crack – not at him, never at him, but at the universe for its relentless, creative cruelty, for finding new ways to hurt the people I loved most. “Look at you, Rowan. Look where you are. The doctor said you were poisoned. Poisoned! Someone put something in you that could have killed you in an hour, and you’re lying here telling me you’re fine?”
His hand squeezed mine. Weakly. The squeeze of a man whose muscles had forgotten their vocabulary but whose intention was still fluent.
“Marlowe-“
“I told you to take care of yourself. I told you. And you promised – you promised me, Rowan, when I left, you said-“
“I know what I said.”
The words stopped me. Not because of their volume – they had almost none – but because of their weight. He knew. He remembered. And the gap between the promise and this hospital bed was the distance he’d traveled without me, the distance I’d allowed to open when I moved into Caelum’s apartment and let the gilded cage distract me from the fact that my brother was dying alone in a house that smelled like our mother’s cooking.
I brought his hand to my face. Pressed his palm against my cheek. His skin was dry and warm and I held it there, breathing against his fingers, and I thought: if I lose you, I lose the last person on earth who knew me before I became this. Before Sterling. Before Caelum. Before the contracts and the cages and the blue dresses and the slaps. You knew me when I was just Marlowe. And without you, there’s no one left who remembers who that was.
“Promise me,” I said. “Promise me you’ll fight this. That you won’t give up. That you won’t leave me. You’re all I have, Rowan. You and Sable and Caelum – you’re my whole family. Everything. You can’t leave.”
His eyes held mine. I could see the struggle inside him – the exhaustion pulling him down, the love pulling him toward me, the impossible mathematics of a man being asked to promise something that biology might not allow.
“I promise,” he said.
I kissed his hand. Pressed my lips against his knuckles and held them there, and the gesture was so old, so instinctive – something our mother used to do, something I hadn’t done since I was a child – that the memory of it opened a door inside me I thought I’d locked permanently.
The machines beeped. The oxygen hissed. The room held us in its clinical, compassionate indifference.
And then I asked.
“Rowan.” My voice was very quiet now. The quiet before a detonation. “Who did this to you?”
His face changed. Something moved behind his eyes – a shadow, a flinch, the involuntary contraction of a person remembering something they’d rather forget. He looked at the ceiling. Looked back at me. His mouth opened beneath the mask.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.