"Pretty Girl. I knew approximately three weeks in."
"Arrogant," I say, and I mean it affectionately, and he knows I mean it affectionately. The small smile that cuts across his face is the real one, the one he keeps for things that mean everything to him.
I lean back into him and he wraps both arms around me and I close my eyes and let myself rest for a minute, actually rest, not the performance of resting while my brain runs laps, but the real thing that comes when you put down the weight you’ve been lugging around.
Across the room I can hear my mom talking quietly to my grandfather, and the low murmur of Levi's voice somewhere in the mix, and the ambient sounds of the hospital doing its overnight work around us. Dakota's heartbeat is steady under my ear, and I focus on it the way I've learned to focus on it when everything else is too loud, and for a little while I just exist in the one true thing of this moment, which is that he is here and I love him and my dad is still fighting on the other side of those surgical doors.
I don't know how much time passes before I hear the footsteps coming toward us. They’re slapping the floor like they’re on a mission.
I'm upright before I know what I’m doing.
The surgeon is still in his cap, which means he came straight from the OR, and that means he's got news that couldn't wait. I search his face the way I've searched a thousand faces in this building over the years looking for the thing that tells me which direction this is going.
He's not wearing the face of bad news.
"Mrs. Harrison." He addresses my mother, who crossed the room in the same moment I did and is standing with her hands clasped in front of her. "Your husband came through the surgery. We were able to repair the lung, and he's in recovery now. He's asking for you."
My mom makes a sound that I have never heard her make before in my life, and my grandfather puts his hand on her back, and Levi's head drops forward for a second in the way of someone who has been holding themselves up by sheer force of will and has just been given permission to relax.
I turn around and Dakota is right there. I walk into him and he closes his arms around me and I press my face into his chest and I cry. I cry in the way I haven't allowed myself to all day, fully sob with my entire body. It’s the full release of twelve hours of fear and love and exhaustion all at once, and he holds me through all of it without saying a word, because he knows that some things don't need words.
He just holds me, my dad is alive, and I love this man. Right now that is everything.
Chapter 24
Dakota
I've been called to Caleb's hospital room. He sent me a quick text this morning and asked me to come by. I'd do anything for Caleb, and I think he knows it. So even though today is my day off, I get dressed, and rush over there.
I've been in this hospital more in the last several days than I usually am in a year, and I know the route to Caleb's room well enough now that I don't have to look at the signs. Third floor, second left, room 314, end of the corridor where it's a little quieter and the window gets the morning light. Ruby asked for that room for exactly that reason, because Caleb Harrison hasn’t slept past six-thirty in years and the idea of him lying in a hospital room staring at a dark window was not something she was willing to tolerate on top of everything else.
I stop in the doorway before I knock, because old habits, and because I want a second to look at him before he knows I'm there.
He looks better than he did two days ago. Better than he looked the night they let us in for ten minutes after surgery, when the color hadn't come back yet and the machines were doing more of the work than they should have to. He's still got the chest tube in, and his color isn't fully what it should be. There's a weariness around his eyes that I've never seen on him before, which is scary in its own way. Seeing a man who you thought was indestructible face mortality is hard. But he's sitting up, the television is on low in the corner, and he's got his phone in his hand. These things together tell me that Caleb Harrison is already doing the exact thing his doctors have probably told him not to do, which is trying to stay on top of what's happening outside this room.
He looks up when I tap my knuckles on the door frame.
"Hey kid." His voice is rough, but it's there, and there's warmth in it that has been in it every time he's spoken to me for as long as I've known him. "Get in here."
I come in and pull the chair closest to the bed around so I'm facing him, not at an angle, and I sit down. "How are you feeling?"
"Like I drove into a tree," he says, and the corner of his mouth pulls up. "Which I did, so that tracks."
"The ditch, technically."
"The tree got involved toward the end." He chuckles with a smirk. He sets his phone down on the bedside table and shifts around, trying to find a comfortable position. "I wanted to talk to you."
"I figured."
"Ruby told me what you did. Getting Molly out of here to go tell her in person and then bringing them back." He holds my gaze, and his eyes are so familiar to me. They are the same eyes Levi has, the same eyes Molly has, that particular quality in the Harrison family that makes you feel like they're all seeing you at the same time. It can be very unnerving. "Thank you for doing that. I wanted you to hear that from me."
"It wasn't anything." I mean it. Not in a self-deprecating way. I know it was the right thing to do. “You would've done the same for anyone in my family."
"I would have," he agrees. "But it matters that you did."
I don't argue with him on that, because I've learned over the years that Caleb Harrison says what he means and doesn't need to be talked out of it.
"We're all family," I say instead, and that's the simplest version of what I could say, and he knows what I mean by it.