Page 24 of Victorious

Gabriel reached a blood-slicked hand out toward them. “It will be okay,” he said, his voice steady, even now. “Just come to me.”

Iris steeled herself and started down the stairs.

One step.

Two.

Each forward motion closing the distance he had measured every day.

“Come to me,” he whispered, willing them to make it.

And they almost did.

Ian, his face buried in Iris’s shoulder, and Iris reaching out for him.

But then the roof caved in, and the stairs gave way, and the last thing Gabriel felt was her fingers skimming his before the whole house came down on top of them.

XNOW. THEN.

LATER …

THE world came back to him in halting steps.

A picture, slowly pieced together by five disjointed senses.

The sterile smell of antiseptic.

The metronomic beep of a machine.

Cold white light, and the taste of pennies, and pain.

Not bright and new, but dull and distant.

Gabriel tried to sit up and was prevented by two things—a much sharper spike of pain, and a nurse’s hand on his shoulder, guiding him back down.

“Easy there,” she said as another, more familiar voice chimed in.

“There he is!” it said in a too-bright way.

Gabriel dragged his gaze to the right and was confronted by one of his old colleagues, Walsh. An internist, known for his booming laugh and easy bedside manner. Gabriel had never cared for either.

“What happened?” he asked, wincing as the words scraped his raw throat.

“Intubation,” explained Walsh. “You’ve been in a medicated coma for the last”—he checked his watch, as if it held the answers, and not the file in his hand—“nineteen days.” He lifted the glasses from the bedside table and handed them back. “How are you feeling?”

Gabriel swallowed and put them on. “Like a house fell down on top of me.”

He hadn’t meant it as a joke, but Walsh chuckled, albeit with a fraction of his usual force. He produced a penlight and shone it in Gabriel’s face. “Honestly, Gray, it’s a goddamn miracle you’re still with us, and not even a vegetable to boot.” Walsh slid the penlight side to side, tracking Gabriel’s pupils as he spoke. “According to the medics, that steel bar kept you from being crushed beneath the wall, but you lost an awful lot of blood. By the time they cut you free, you didn’t have a pulse. No telling exactly how long your brain went without oxygen, but a good old-fashioned defib and two transfusions later…”

Gabriel studied the other man’s face. Walsh’s tone was jovial enough, but there was something—a careful blankness—behind the cheer that worried him. “What about Iris and Ian?”

He blinked, and saw his wife and son, their shapes ghosted against his lids. But then he was staring at Walsh again. And it was there, in the silence. He knew, before Walsh said the words.

“I’m so sorry. They didn’t make it.”

Dr. Gabriel Gray had been a therapist for twenty-three years.

He knew the shapes that grief could take. The whiplash, the recoil. Denial. Anger. Horror. Pain. He knew, and so he braced for the force of the cataclysmic news to hit, unsure which would overwhelm him first. He waited for the sickening lurch of his world crashing down a second time. He waited, but the world did not even tremble.