Molly
We've been here for twelve hours, waiting for my dad to be taken into surgery, and then waiting for him to get out. We're still waiting on him to get out.
I shiver as I think about what we learned when we got back to the hospital. Dad's lung had been punctured bad enough that he needed a chest tube and then surgery. He'd also lost a lot of blood, and his vitals were not good. They'd had to stabilize him before they could take him back.
"God, I'm exhausted," I whisper to Dakota, who sits beside me.
He's not left my side once in all of this, and if I wondered if he loved me, I don't have to wonder it now.
The waiting room has gone through a few transformations over the last twelve hours. In the early hours after all this happened it was packed, every chair taken by someone in a uniform or someone who loved someone in a uniform, and I was grateful for it even when it felt overwhelming. Somewhere around the three-hour mark it thinned out to the people who were staying regardless, which is my mom in the chair closest to the hallway that leads back to the surgical suites, my grandfather and grandmother on one side of her and Levi on the other, Magnolia Grace curled into Levi's side with her head on his shoulder. Dakota and I are two chairs down, and I have been tucked under his arm for so long that I've lost track of when that started. Darren, Aunt Kels, and Uncle Nick are sitting across the room in another group of chairs.
The Thompson family brought in food from The Café at some point, and they haven’t left. Here to support us like they always are.
The hospital sounds different at this hour. I know this building the way I know my own house, know its rhythms and its patterns and the way it sounds when the overnight shift has switched over to the quietness of sleep and the daytime chaos has faded away. Usually that transition is a comfort to me because it means I'm in my element. When I’m on L&D at night, I’m in my comfortable place. It’s like a comfort show I turn on when I’m stressed. Tonight I'm not a nurse here. Tonight I'm a daughter, and the familiar sounds of this place are doing something different to me than they usually do, running too close to the fear I've been managing all day. My anxiety spikes through the roof.
"Tell me something," I say to Dakota, keeping my voice low enough that only we can hear.
He shifts beside me and looks down, and he doesn't ask me what I want to hear, just thinks about it for a moment. "Your dad took that ditch to protect Levi and me," he says finally, and his voice is quiet, sober even. "He could have hit the brakes and put himself in a better position and let us figure out the rest. He didn't. He calculated the whole thing in about a second and made the call that kept us from hitting anything, and that's not luck, Molly. That's a man who has been doing this for twenty years and knows what he's doing. And that same man is in surgery right now instead of a morgue, which tells me that all those years of knowing what he's doing are still working in his favor."
I breathe through my nose and lean my head against his shoulder. "I know that. I know it up here," I tap my temple, "but the other part of me just keeps seeing him on that stretcher."
He doesn't argue with that, because he's never been the type to argue with the truth. He just tightens his arm around me and lets the silence sit for a minute.
I've been thinking about something for the last several hours, the thing that happens when you're in a waiting room with nothing to do except think and feel and try not to do too much of either. It's been sitting at the back of mind. Maybe it always has been, and I just never wanted to look at it too closely, but tonight it’s there. Behind the fear about my dad and the exhaustion and the phone I keep occupying my hands with to avoid it, and I've been waiting for the right moment to say it out loud. For some reason, I think that moment is now in the early morning when everything is stripped down and bare.
"I'm scared," I say.
"I know. He's going to be okay."
"No." I pull back enough to look at him, because I want him to see my face when I say this. "I mean yes, I'm scared about Dad. But I'm also scared about you. About this being you one day." I watch him take that in, and I don't look away from it, neither does he. "I know what your job is. I've always known what your job is. I went into this with my eyes open, and I'm not saying I want you to do anything different. I'm just telling you that today I understood what it really means to love someone who does what you do, and it's terrifying, and I don't want to pretend it isn't."
He's quiet for a moment, and I can see him thinking about how to answer it, not in the way of someone who's trying to find the right thing to say. But in the way of a man who wants to validate my feelings, and answer honestly.
"Okay," he says. "I'll give you that. And I want you to give me something in return."
"What?" I turn to face him completely.
"I want you to think about what it's like from where I stand." His voice is still low, still even, but there's something in it now that tells something has been eating at him too, and he's been waiting for the same opening I was. "You work Labor and Delivery. Most of the time it's the best thing that happens in this building on any given day, and I know that, and I love that for you. But you have also told me about the nights where things go wrong in ways no one planned for. You've told me about the patient who came through your floor last year who had a partner who showed up angry. You told me about the time security had to be called to your unit." He holds my gaze with his, refusing to drop it. "I go home from a long shift thinking about you in this building and the things that can happen that you can't predict or control, and I sit with that the same way you're sitting with this tonight. I just haven't said it out loud yet."
I open my mouth and then close it again, because I hadn't thought about it from that angle, had not fully looked at it from his side of the equation, the same fear wearing a different uniform.
"We're both right," I say slowly.
"We're both right," he agrees, rubbing a hand down his cheek. "And neither one of us can make the other person's job safe, because that's not how any of this works. But I think what we can do — " he reaches up and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, and leaves his hand there along my jaw for a moment — "is be honest with each other. When you're scared, you tell me. When I'm scared, I tell you. We don't hide it and don’t pretend it’s not there. We face it, and we talk about it."
I think about what it would have meant to have that kind of agreement with someone years ago, and I realize I wouldn’t ever have had it with anyone else I’ve dated. Dakota is the kind of person who doesn’t flinch when the hard things show up. He works through it and lets you know you aren’t alone. This is the man I’ve waited for my entire life.
"I can do that," I tell him.
"Good." He holds my eyes in the dim light of the waiting room, and everything about his face right now is open in a way that he doesn't let it be for most people. He’s showing me he’s strong, but at the same time he feels things deeply, and he’s willing to be vulnerable with me in ways I’ve never had a man be vulnerable before. "I love you, Molly. I've loved you for longer than the last few months, and I'm not going anywhere, and I need you to know that isn't something I say to people. I don't say it because it sounds right or because the moment calls for it. I say it because it's true, and you deserve to hear it from me in a moment like this one when there's nothing pretty about anything and it's just the actual truth of where I am."
The tears I’ve been holding back for twelve hours finally make it all the way to the surface, and I let them, because this is not the kind of moment you hold yourself back from. I reach up and put my hand over his where it's still resting along my jaw, and I look at him the way I've been looking at him for months without letting myself fully accept what it was.
"I love you," I tell him, and my voice breaks slightly on it. "Saying it this time feels much more real than all the other times we’ve said it. This feels like it means more because there's so much more to lose."
"There is," he agrees, and he doesn't talk me out of that fear, because he is not the kind of man who minimizes things. "And we're going to lose small things and survive them, and one day we're going to lose something bigger and we're going to survive that too, because that's what people who love each other do. They survive things together." His thumb moves along my cheekbone. "You don't have to be scared of saying it to me, ever. I knew you loved me way before you did."
I let out something that is halfway between a laugh and a sob. "You did not."