Another twenty minutes pass and Silas is in the doorway with Nash asleep against his shoulder.
Nash's small hand is in the back of Silas' t-shirt, fisted in the cotton the way a kid sleeps when he doesn't want to let go.
Silas is still in his cut.
There's dust on his boots from the warehouse lot in Brady.
His hands are clean, but the cuffs of his shirt aren't.
His eyes find me on the bed, and the breath I've been holding for hours leaves me all at once.
He doesn't speak.
He crosses the room slowly because our boy is asleep against him.
Bex stands up from the chair, crosses to him at the doorway, and puts her hand on Nash's back for a moment without speaking.
She squeezes Silas' forearm, then slips out of the room and closes the door behind her.
Silas comes to the bed.
He bends down and lowers Nash onto the mattress beside me with the careful weight of a man who carried a sleeping child for three hours and doesn't want to wake him.
Nash murmurs something I can't make out.
His face turns into the side of my hip. His hand comes off Silas' t-shirt, finds the hem of my hospital gown, and stays there.
My arm goes around him.
My hand cups the back of his head where his hair is matted with the sweat of a six-year-old who slept hard.
He's warm. He's breathing. He's whole.
The tears I haven't let come yet today come now.
They go into Nash's hair without making a sound.
Silas stands beside the bed without moving for a long moment, his eyes on the two of us.
I reach for him with my free hand.
He takes my hand, and the blood that's still dried under the ring goes against the warmth of his palm.
My ring goes up to his mouth, and he kisses the gold band, then the two emeralds, then the diamond, slowly, one after the other, the way a man kisses a promise he intends to keep.
He sits down on the edge of the bed.
His forehead comes to the side of my head.
He stays there.
He's shaking. Not visibly. The tremor comes through the hand that's still in his.
"You came home," I whisper into the small space between us.
His mouth presses against my hair. "I came home."
He pulls back just enough to look at me, his free hand coming up to my face. His thumb finds my jaw, then the soft place under my ear, then the corner of my mouth.