330 How could you do this to us?
Chapter 330 How could you do this to us?
Mia’s POV
+25 BONUS
All of it crashed over me at once. My chest tightened, and I felt the familiar burn of tears behind my
eyes.
“Don’t,” I whispered, but I wasn’t sure if I was talking to him or to myself.
Kyle shifted in his chair. The IV line snaked from his arm to a bag of clear fluid that hung from a metal pole. There were other things too–a pulse oximeter clipped to his finger, a small device that beeped softly every few seconds.
“How long?” I asked, my voice barely audible.
“How long what?”
“How long have you been like this? This sick?”
Kyle looked out the window at the city lights. “It’s been progressive. The autoimmune cascade started after the shooting, but it’s accelerated in the last year.‘
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The tears came then, hot and unstoppable. They spilled down my cheeks like a dam bursting, and I pressed both hands to my mouth to try to hold back the sob that was clawing its way up my throat.
“Mia-”
“No.” The word came out strangled. “Just… no.‘
I couldn’t stop looking at him. At the way his sweater hung on his frame like it belonged to a much larger person. At the sharp angles of his collarbones visible beneath the fabric. At his hands, which had always been strong and sure, now looking delicate and almost translucent.
Kyle in the garden at his mother’s house, his sleeves rolled up, dirt under his fingernails as he helped me plant roses. Kyle’s hands steady on the steering wheel during our silent drives home from dinner with his mother. Kyle’s fingers intertwined with mine in the hospital when I’d first heard the twins‘ heartbeats, his face transformed with wonder.
Those same hands now looked like they might break if I touched them.
“I hate you,” I whispered through my tears, but even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. Or maybe it was true and not true at the same time, like light being all colors and no colors simultaneously.
Kyle’s face didn’t change. “I know.”
“I hate that you left us. I hate that you lied. I hate that you’re sick and you never told me. I hate that our children don’t know you and I hate that they might never really know you and I hate that you
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Chapter 330 How could you do this to us?
+25 BONUS
made that choice for all of us.”
The words poured out of me like blood from a wound, and Kyle just sat there and took it. His eyes never left my face, even as 1 fell apart in front of him.
“And I hate the most is that you look like this,” I continued, my voice breaking completely.
The sob finally escaped, raw and animal–like. I doubled over with the force of it, my arms wrapped around my middle like I could hold myself together through sheer will.
Kyle made a sound–maybe my name, maybe just an exhale of pain–and I heard the soft scrape of his chair as he started to stand.
“Don’t,” I said sharply, straightening. “Don’t get up.”
He settled back into the chair, but his hands gripped the armrests like he was fighting every instinct
he had.
I couldn’t hold it together anymore. The dam burst completely, and I sobbed–not the quiet, controlled crying I’d done before, but something primal and broken that came from a place so deep I’d forgotten it existed.
Four years of suppressed grief poured out of me in waves. I cried for the marriage we’d lost, for the man he’d been, for the children who would grow up without their father. I cried for Catherine, who’d died loving a son who was slowly disappearing.
I cried for the life we might have had if he’d trusted me enough to tell me the truth.
My legs gave out, and I sank to the floor beside his chair, my back against the wall, my knees drawn up to my chest. The tears kept coming, hot and relentless, soaking through the fabric of my shirt. I couldn’t catch my breath between the sobs that tore through my chest like physical blows.
I don’t know how long I cried. Time seemed suspended in that hospital room, marked only by the rhythm of my breaking heart and the distant sounds of the hospital around us. But eventually, as the worst of it began to ebb, I became aware of something different.
The steady beeping of Kyle’s monitors had stopped.
I looked up through my tears to find Kyle sitting on the floor beside me, his back against the same wall. The IV line lay coiled on the floor next to him, disconnected. The pulse oximeter that had been clipped to his finger was gone. He’d removed everything–every wire, every tube, every electronic tether that had connected him to the machines.
He was close enough that I could see the fine tremor in his hands, the way his breathing was slightly labored without whatever support the machines had been providing.
“Kyle,” I whispered, my voice hoarse from crying. “How could you-“I gestured helplessly at the
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Chapter 330 How could you do this to us?
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