Chapter Twelve – Steady
I woke up to white walls again.
The same ceiling. The same sterile light pressing down on me like a hand I couldn't push away. My hospital clothes clung to my skin, soaked through with sweat, my hair plastered against my neck. For a long moment I just stared upward, chest heaving, trying to separate what was real from what wasn't.
A dream. Was it really just a dream?
The shadow. The corridor. The books turning themselves. The boy with the glowing eyes whispering things that felt like prophecy. The version of me with sharp teeth and golden eyes telling me I had been running from myself my whole life.
I pressed my palms flat against the mattress, grounding myself.
Real. This is real. The scratchy blanket. The drip in my arm. The distant hum of the hospital existing beyond this room.
I exhaled slowly. "A dream," I whispered. "It was just a dream."
But even as I said it, the word tasted wrong. Like a lie I was telling myself out of necessity rather than conviction. Dreams didn't leave you feeling scraped hollow. Dreams didn't leave fingerprints on your memory, warm and deliberate, like something had touched you and wanted you to remember the feeling.
I sat up too fast. The room tilted. My vision blurred at the edges and the panic arrived before I could stop it — rushing in like floodwater under a door, cold and unstoppable.
Did I really write this? Is this all part of my book?
The thought spiraled, and the spiral had no floor.
I couldn't remember. That was the worst part. Two years of writing, two years of pouring myself onto pages, and now it was all fog. Fragmented. Blurred. Like someone had taken an eraser to the most important parts and left only the outline of something I used to know. I reached for a scene, any scene, and my fingers closed around nothing. I reached for a character, a chapter title, a single line of dialogue — and the memory dissolved the moment I touched it.
Why can't I remember my own book?
My hands flew to my hair. I pulled. Hard. The pain was sharp and immediate and real and I didn't stop because at least it was something I could feel that made sense.
"I don't want to do this," I choked out. My voice cracked in three places. "I don't want any of this. I didn't ask for—"
The sob broke free before I finished the sentence. And once it started, it didn't stop. I cried the way people cry when they've been holding it for too long — ugly, gasping, undignified, the kind of crying that has no audience because there's no performance left in it. Just grief. Just fear. Just a girl who had wished for escape and gotten something she couldn't name.
My chest tightened. My breath shortened. The walls of the room pressed inward, the white becoming blinding, the silence becoming loud, and I recognized distantly that I was tipping into a panic attack — the edges of my vision darkening, my lungs forgetting their rhythm, my hands shaking against my knees.
The door opened.
I didn't look up. I didn't have the strength.
Footsteps crossed the room. Unhurried. Steady. Like someone who had walked into storms before and knew better than to run through them.
"Hey."
Hudson's voice. Warm. Careful.
I still didn't look up.
The mattress dipped slightly as he sat beside me — not too close, not crowding, just present. I felt him before I saw him, the way you feel a fire from across a room. Something solid entering the chaos.
"Hey." His voice dropped lower. "Look at me."
I shook my head. My hands were fists in my hair.
"Kaia." Not a command. Just my name, spoken like it mattered. "Look at me."
Slowly, reluctantly, I lifted my eyes.
He was watching me with an expression I didn't know how to categorize. Not pity. Not alarm. Something steadier than both. His brown eyes held mine without flinching, without the discomfort most people showed when confronted with someone else's falling apart.
"Breathe," he said quietly. "In."
I tried. My lungs stuttered.
"In," he repeated patiently. He demonstrated, his own chest rising slowly, deliberately. "Follow me.
Just this. Nothing else right now."
I followed.
"Out." His chest fell.
Mine followed. Ragged. Uneven. But there.
"In."
Again.
"Out."
We sat like that for what felt like a long time. Him breathing. Me chasing his rhythm like a small boat following a larger one out of rough water. Gradually — slowly, stubbornly — my lungs remembered what they were for. My vision cleared. The walls stopped moving.
"There you go," he murmured. "Easy. Stay with me."
Stay with me.
The words settled somewhere inside me I didn't expect. Something about them was unbearably gentle. Like being handed something fragile and being trusted not to drop it.
I laughed. A short, broken, embarrassing sound. "Sorry," I managed. "I don't usually—" I gestured vaguely at my own face, my wet cheeks, the general disaster of my existence. "This."
"Don't apologize." He said it simply. No performance of reassurance, no rushing to make me feel better. Just a fact.
I looked at him properly for the first time since he'd walked in. He looked tired, I realized. Like he'd been here longer than I knew. There were faint shadows beneath his eyes, a tension in his jaw that his easy expression didn't quite conceal.
"How long have you been here?" I asked.
"Couple hours." He shrugged lightly. "Wanted to make sure you were okay before they discharged you."
I swallowed. "You didn't have to do that."
"I know."
The simplicity of it undid something in me. Not dramatically. Just quietly — a knot loosening somewhere deep, a door I'd kept locked for years shifting slightly on its hinges.
Nobody stays. That was the rule I had lived by. The truth the world had taught me one abandoned morning at a time, in every group home, every temporary room, every face that smiled and then disappeared. Nobody stays without a reason. Nobody chooses you without an angle.
And yet here he was. Choosing to stay. And I couldn't find the angle.
I wanted to trust it.
I was terrified to trust it.
"Thank you," I said softly. The words felt insufficient for what I meant, which was something closer to: you have no idea what it means that you're still here.
He nodded once. Then, carefully, like he was approaching something that might startle: "Do you want to talk about what happened just now? Or do you want to sit quietly for a bit?"
I considered. Outside the window, pale sunlight leaked through the blinds, striping the white floor in gold. Somewhere down the hall a cart wheeled past. Normal sounds. Normal world.
"Quietly," I said. "Just for a minute."
He nodded again and leaned back slightly, not leaving, not pressing. Just there. Solid and warm and inexplicably, dangerously easy to be near.
I turned back to the window.
And tried very hard not to notice that when he'd walked in, for just a fraction of a second, his eyes had swept the room before they found me.
Like he was checking something.
Like he already knew what he expected to find.