I didn’t think someone with skin that dark could turn gray, but he has. He looks ashy, like he’s just a pile of dust that happened to get blown into the shape of a man.
He thinks he’s already lost her.
The realization hits like a rumble of clarity somewhere deep inside me. I drag my eyes away from his face and fix them on Lexi beside him, desperate to find some kind of hope there, some sign that will tell me I’m not too late.
I have a moment to stare at her before she spots me. She looks older than the last time I saw her—not so much in her face as in the way she carries herself. Even now, when I know she’s barely keeping it together, she stands tall, braced for a fight just like me. She used to hate how tall she was. She used to hate that she was skinny while Nadia got all the curves, used to complain about being as dark asOnclewhile Nadia was ‘blessed’ with lighter skin.
Becoming a mother changed her. Her presence grew to be as tall as the height she’d always been ashamed of. She grew into the person I see standing across the room from me now, the person all my hopes are pinned on, the person I realize I don’t even know anymore.
We’ve wasted so much time. In the back of my head, there’s somehow room for me to realize how much of a fuckingwasteall these years spent missing out on each other’s lives have been.
I don’t have time to think any deeper about that before Lexi’s gaze shifts to lock on mine. We stare at each other, and I know with the certainty you only feel around family that I’m not too late. Not yet. Somewhere in this hospital, Auntie is still holding on for us.
“Where is she? How is she? What’s going on?”
I’m asking the questions before I’m even all the way across the room. One of my hands instinctively reaches to gripOncle’s arm as he pushes himself up out of his chair. The other reaches for Lexi’s shoulder.
“She just went into surgery.” Lexi’s fingers close over mine. “They didn’t know if they could operate, but they decided to try. We don’t have many details.”
“Did you...Did you get to see her, before...?”
Lexi shakes her head, her lips pressed into a tight line. “They wouldn’t let us. They had to rush her into surgery as soon as they decided to go through with it.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it?” I prompt. “It’s good that they’re doing the surgery?”
She squeezes my hand. “I don’t know. None of it’s good, Cole. They restarted her heart in the ambulance.”
“What even happened? How did she have aheart attack?”
I don’t know much about heart attack risk factors, but I’m pretty Auntie can’t have many of them. Sure she’s getting older, but she’s no less healthy than the next person.
“They said that her—”
Lexi’s explanation gets cut off when someone starts calling her name. We all turn towards the voice and see Nadia sidestepping around the crowd to get to us. She has office clothes and high heels on, her braids swishing against her arms as she hurries over. I take the sight of her in, still so familiar despite how long she’s been absent in my life, and it hits me so much harder than I was expecting: that old urge to protect her, to keep her safe, to keep her happy.
In the end, I did none of those things, but no matter what form it took or how mislabelled I let it get, there was always some kind of love in the way I felt about her. There’s never been a time when she meant nothing to me.
I step back as she approaches, clearing the way so she can run toOncleand Lexi. Lexi greets her with open arms, and Nadia steps into them. They hold each other long enough for me to hear Nadia murmur, “I’m here now. It’s okay.”
She pulls away after that and hugsOncleso tightly it’s like she squeezes the dust into shape and leaves him a bit more solid than he was, a bit less likely to blow away.
She kisses his cheek before letting him go. For a second, I wonder if she’s even going to acknowledge that I’m here, but then she turns to me.
There’s the briefest hesitation, just the slightest sense of awareness about what this moment means, about how much of the future it will determine. I’ve imagined seeing her so many times, but I never got farther than this. I could never predict what would happen if we ever stood face to face again.
“Nad...”
The nickname slips out before I can decide if it’s the right thing to say. An expression I don’t recognize takes over her features, and then she’s wrapping her arms around me.
The shock is almost enough to knock me to the ground, but instead of falling over, I find myself hugging her back.
I don’t mistake her next words to me as absolution; there’s too much hurt between us for a single moment to clear it away, but there’s a promise in them. There’s a vow to clear away as much of that hurt as we can.
“I’m glad you’re here.”
* * *
Five hours and twenty-three minutes.
