Page 89 of When the Sky Falls

“You. Holding them. Saying their names.” He pauses. “Coming back.”

I watch him for a beat. Watch the way his jaw tightens, the way he doesn’t look at me right away. His fingers twist together in his lap.

“I didn’t know if you would,” he admits, eyes still fixed on some invisible point on the floor. “I’d sit here for hours. Days. Talking to you. Telling you about the twins, about Reese, about how Carson won’t stop stress baking and Penelope’s been threatening to kill Alex over tour dates—anything, just to fill the silence.”

He finally looks at me.

And it wrecks me.

Because this version of Fletch—quiet, vulnerable, cracked open and still standing—he’s not the boy I left behind.

He’s the man who stayed.

“I thought I lost everything,” I whisper. “I thought… when I woke up and the dream was gone, that there wouldn’t be anything left.”

He exhales hard. “There is.”

“I know.”

A pause.

Then, softer, “You stayed.”

“I never had a choice,” he says, voice rough. “I wanted to stay, Mya. I wanted to be here the moment you woke up so I could tell you—” He breaks off, dragging a hand through his hair. “Shit. I don’t even know where to start.”

I reach out, threading my fingers through his. “Then don’t start at the beginning. Start here.”

His eyes search mine. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

And there it is—his smile. Crooked and boyish and weighted with months of worry and sleepless nights. He brings our joined hands to his lips, kissing my knuckles like he’s afraid they’ll disappear.

“I love you,” he says, like it’s the easiest thing he’s ever done. “I never stopped. Even when I didn’t know how to fix it, even when I was scared shitless. I never stopped.”

The tears come before I can stop them, slipping down my cheeks like punctuation.

“I dreamed a whole world where I was loved like that,” I whisper. “And then I woke up and realized I already had it.”

He leans in, pressing his forehead to mine.

And for the first time in three months, maybe longer, I feel like I’m not just breathing…

I’m alive.

Chapter Eighteen

FLETCH

The second I help her back into bed, I want to fall apart.

Not in the loud, explosive way. Not fists through drywall or screaming into pillows. This kind of falling apart is quieter. Bone-deep. The kind that doesn’t come with warning signs or soundtracks. Just the slow, splintering realization that something inside you cracked a long time ago—and you never noticed until now.

Her skin’s still too pale. Her hands still shake when she tries to move. But her eyes? God, her eyes are awake. Haunted, but here. And after three months of waiting, of whispering her name into a silence that almost swallowed me whole, I finally get to look into them again.

She settles into the pillows, wincing as the movement pulls against everything still healing inside her. I tug the blanket up, careful. Reverent. Like she’s glass. Like she might vanish again if I breathe wrong.

“Hey,” I say, voice low, raw from disuse and every word I never got to say.