She left. The room was quiet again. The monitors beeped. Through the half-closed blinds, the sky outside was dark. Night had come while she was under.
"You've been here the whole time," Sienna said. It wasn't a question.
"The whole time. Since Mara drove me here this morning. I held your hand until they took you into surgery and then I sat in the corridor and waited." Elise stroked Sienna's hair back from her forehead. Her touch was feather-light, avoiding the cuts and bruises. "The team was here too. They only went to get food when Dr. Mars said you were stable. Frankie kept making terrible jokes to keep me from spiralling. Lou sat in the corner and didn't say a word and somehow that helped more than anything. Helen came. She sat with me. She didn't try to therapise me, she just sat there. Mara ran logistics, called people, kept everything moving. Lex brought coffee."
Sienna blinked. "Lex brought coffee?"
"Four rounds. She said someone had to and everyone else was useless." Elise's mouth twitched. The ghost of a smile. "They love you, Sienna. You think you're just the team doctor but you're not. You're theirs. And they showed up for you."
Sienna's throat ached. Not from the ventilator tube. From a grief bigger and older and more important than that.
Sienna's eyes were heavy. The pain medication was pulling her under, a warm, blurring fog that softened the edges of the room and the bed and Elise's face above her. She fought it. She didn't want to close her eyes. She'd had enough of the dark, the in-between space where Elise was a memory instead of a presence.
"Stay," Sienna whispered. The word she'd said to Elise weeks ago, on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, undone. The same word. The same need.
"I'm staying." Elise pressed her lips to Sienna's temple. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
Sienna closed her eyes. Elise's hand was in hers, solid and real. The pain was there, a constant bass note beneath the medication, but above it was the sound of Elise's breathing and the beep of the monitors and the knowledge, certain and absolute, that she was alive and loved and held.
She let the fog take her. This time the darkness was not the formless void of the operating theatre but a gentler dark, layered with the scent of Elise's skin and the press of her hand and the low murmur of her voice saying words Sienna couldn't quite make out, words that sounded like her name, words that sounded like love, words that followed her down through the layers of consciousness like a rope she could hold.
Elise's thumb moved across her knuckles in slow, steady circles, and the rhythm followed Sienna down into sleep. This time she wasn't floating in nothing. She was falling into a life that was waiting. Into a love that was real. Into tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after it, with the woman who had sat in a hospital chair for hours because leaving was not an option.
Sienna slept, and she was held, and she was home.
20
ELISE
The hospital corridor was familiar now. Elise had walked it so many times over the past three weeks that she knew its rhythms: the squeak of her trainers on the linoleum, the smell of each section, antiseptic near the nurses' station, coffee near the break room, lilies near the reception desk where someone had placed a vase of lilies that were changed every Monday. She'd arrived at seven-thirty every morning, without exception, rain or sun or game day, and stayed until the nurses gently suggested she go home, and she'd come back at seven-thirty the next day, and the corridor had become as familiar as the one in the stadium.
Today was different. Today there was a lightness in her step that had been absent for twenty-one days.
Sienna was coming home. The words circled in Elise's head like a song she couldn't stop humming, bright and persistent and real.
Not home to Sienna's apartment, with its spare furnishing and its ocean view and its empty fridge. Home to Elise's apartment, because Elise had told her, in the tone she used when the matter was not up for discussion, that Sienna would bestaying with her while she recovered, end of discussion. Sienna had opened her mouth to argue, because Sienna always opened her mouth to argue about accepting help, and Elise had said "No" and that had been the end of it.
She turned the corner and pushed through the door to Sienna's room and stopped.
Sienna was standing by the window. Not in the hospital gown that had made her look small and institutional for three weeks, but in her own clothes. Dark trousers, a loose white shirt, the sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her dark hair was washed and brushed and fell to her shoulders, a few grey strands catching the morning light. Her left arm was still in a cast from wrist to elbow, but she held it against her chest with an ease that suggested the pain had faded from acute to manageable. Her glasses were on her face and she was looking out the window at the hospital car park and the trees beyond and the strip of ocean visible above the roofline, and the sight of her standing there, upright, dressed, alive, made Elise's chest compress so hard and so fast she had to grip the door frame.
Sienna turned. Her face was pale, the bruises from the accident faded to yellow-green shadows on her jaw and forehead, and she was thinner than she'd been, the cheekbones sharper, the collarbones more pronounced beneath the white shirt. But her eyes were warm and bright and when she saw Elise, the smile that broke across her face was the real one. The one that crinkled her eyes and softened her jaw and made her look like a woman who had been waiting for exactly this person to walk through the door.
"You're dressed," Elise said.
"I'm dressed."
"You look incredible."
The colour rose from Sienna's collar, up her neck to her cheeks, and the sight of it after three weeks of hospital gownsand pallid hospital light made Elise's throat tight. She'd missed that. She'd missed it with a ferocity that surprised her.
She crossed the room in three steps and wrapped her arms around Sienna. Gently. Mindful of the ribs and the cast and the bruises and the surgical sites. She held her gently, mindful of a body still healing, and Sienna's good arm came around her waist and held on tight, and they stood in the hospital room with the morning light falling across them and neither of them let go.
"I'm so glad you're here," Sienna whispered against her shoulder.
"I'm so glad you're standing." Elise pulled back just enough to look at her, taking in every detail. The bruise on Sienna's temple had faded to yellow. The cast on her left arm was covered in small handwritten notes from the team.
"Dr. Mars says I'm a remarkable patient."