Chapter 70:

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POV BRYN + TESS

It happened on a Sunday morning. Nine-seventeen a.m. Coffee. Newspaper. A kitchen that smelled like toast and normalcy.

Rune was sitting at the counter. Bryn was in the hallway, ten feet away, coming from the bathroom. She heard the cup hit the marble — a crack, ceramic on stone — and then the sound of a body hitting the floor, and the sound was wrong, heavier than a fall should be, the dead weight of someone who has lost consciousness between one moment and the next.

She was there in three seconds.

He was on the floor beside the island. On his back. Arms at his sides. Eyes open but empty — the pupils fixed, the face blank. Not the blankness she knew from his controlled expressions. This was the blankness of absence. The brain not receiving what it needed because the heart had stopped sending it.

“Cade!” she screamed.

She was already on the floor. Kneeling. Positioning. Heel of the palm on the sternum, between the nipples, fingers laced, arms straight — the sequence Cade had taught her at six a.m. on a kitchen counter months ago, drilled into her muscle memory with the same rigor he applied to everything.

She compressed.

One and two and three and four—

Hard. Deep. Five centimeters, one hundred per minute. Her arms were strong from years of pressing clay against bone. She’d trained for this. She’d practiced on a mannequin. She’d imagined it happening and told herself she’d be ready.

She wasn’t ready. Nothing prepares you for pressing your body weight into the chest of someone you love and feeling the ribs flex under your palms and knowing that you are the thing between this person and gone.

𝖳he 𝗯𝖾𝘀𝘵 r𝘦𝖺d𝗶ոg еxрe𝗋𝘪eո𝘤е 𝘰𝗻 𝗴𝖺𝗅𝘯ov𝖾l𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗆

Thirty compressions. She tilted his head. Opened the airway. Two breaths. His chest rose and fell — her force, not his.

Thirty more.

Cade came through the door. The satchel already open. He ripped Rune’s shirt — buttons scattering on the tile — and placed the pads. One right chest. One left side.

The machine analyzed. The screen read. The calm synthetic voice:

“Shock advised.”

“Clear,” Cade said.

She pulled back. The shock delivered. Rune’s body arched off the floor and came back down and she was on him again — one and two and three and four — because the machine said resume and she resumed and the rhythm was the only thing she could give him, the beat his heart had stopped providing, replaced now by her arms, her weight, her body doing the work his refused to do.

“Resume compressions,” the machine said.

“Ambulance is three minutes out,” Cade said. Phone in one hand, the other on Rune’s carotid, checking between her compressions for any sign of return.

She compressed. Her shoulders burned. Her wrists ached. She didn’t stop.

Thirty. Breathe. Thirty. Breathe.

His face under her, slack and wrong. The face she’d drawn in a hospital and sculpted in clay and kissed in a living room after a funeral. The face that had become her default, her baseline, the one her brain went to when she closed her eyes. That face was blue at the lips. Gray at the cheeks.

She compressed harder.

The paramedics came. They took over — mechanical compressions, epinephrine, intubation. She stepped back and Cade was beside her and they stood against the kitchen wall and watched professionals do what Bryn had been doing alone on the floor, and her arms were shaking, and her shirt was soaked with sweat, and she could not stop looking at his face.

“We have a rhythm,” one of them said. “V-fib. Shocking again.”

Another shock.

“Sinus rhythm. Weak but present.”

Present. He was present. The heart had found something — a signal, a path, whatever electrical thread the defibrillator had restrung — and it was beating. Badly. But beating.

They loaded him on the stretcher. Bryn climbed in the ambulance. Nobody stopped her. She reached into her pocket. The clay face was there — Tess’s face, the small palm-sized sculpture from the study, from the night she’d placed it on Sandro’s documents. She didn’t remember pocketing it. But it was there. Her hand had taken it this morning — picking it up from the nightstand where it had migrated, putting it in her jeans without thinking, bringing Tess. Because she always brought Tess. Everywhere. For seven years.

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