Inside, in the silence of a room where no one witnessed it, the unbreakable opened along a line it had been developing for years. And the woman sitting beside her son's bed drowned in something too large and too tangled and too long-delayed to carry a single name.
— — — — — —
Maya sat beside Ethan's bed in the low, humming quiet of the hospital room. Her eyes moved over the damage that had been done to him, the bruising, the bandaging, the particular stillness of a body that had been pushed past what it could absorb and was now simply waiting for time to do what medicine had started.
She had called his family. They were on their way. Until they arrived, there was nothing to do but remain, and think, and try to hold the pieces of the last several hours into a shape that made sense.
