I don’t know if he’s talking about the choice we have to make, or the situation. Maybe both.
All of us wait in silence, and after several long moments, Finn nods. Just a quick jerk of his head, his expression still tight with pain, but it’s enough.
Lachlan steps over to Dr. Andrews to tell him our decision, and they speak in low voices before the doctor gestures the rest of us over.
“I understand this is difficult,” he tells us. “I truly am sorry we couldn’t do more for her. We’re going to shut everything down. You can stay with her as long as you like. It’ll be quiet in there.”
Lachlan nods. We all wait while the equipment keeping our mother alive is turned off, and then I follow my brothers into the room. It smells like it always does—antiseptic, stark, just barely masked by the flowers we keep on the windowsill.
Connor leans over the bed. He murmurs something, his voice quiet as he presses a kiss to her forehead. Finn is next, taking longer, barely able to tear himself away. Lachlan bows his head, whispering so low that I couldn’t hear him if I tried.
When I walk up to my mother, I almost can’t tell that she’s still alive. Her breathing is so shallow that it’s almost imperceptible. I know she doesn’t have long.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. I know I’m quiet, but my voice is a roar in my ears. Maybe it’s my blood making the noise, raging at me not to do this. “I should have fixed this. I still haven’t fixed dad’s death.”
I can’t shut my eyes. I gaze down at her face, trying to memorize every freckle and every line. To burn them into my mind’s eyes so that I can’t forget her when she’s gone.
“I’m lost,” I confess, trying to keep my voice from breaking. “I don’t know if you’d be proud of me. But ma, I’m trying so hard. I want to make you proud.”
My throat tightens, and I clench my jaw, my eyes burning.
“I wish you could be here. I would have wanted you at my wedding, even if it is arranged. Maybe you would have liked Rose. Maybe you would have known what to do. God knows I don’t.”
My throat is too tight to say anything else for a long moment, and when I manage to speak again, I say the only thing there is left to tell her.
“Sleep,” I whisper. “I know he’s waiting for you.”
Then my brothers and I sit and watch. There’s nothing else to do. The machines are gone, the noises that I never noticed gone. There’s no hiss of a ventilator, no beep to monitor her heart or oxygen levels. It’s all gone. The room is quiet. We can only hear each other.
I wait until her breathing stops, until something vital leaves her body. It’s like the color leaves her face, the luster seeping from her hair.
My brothers and I sit in silence, frozen in time, waiting for another breath that will never come.
CHAPTER21
Rose
In the moment when Aiden’s mother dies, it feels like someone leaving the room. It’s like a door has opened and closed, one that none of us have the key to.
Standing quietly near the wall, I twist my fingers together, barely even breathing as silence consumes the room. The sense of grief that fills the space is suffocating, radiating out from Aiden and each of his brothers in waves.
I feel like I’ve been allowed into a space where I’m not sure I belong, allowed to witness something too intimate.
The woman in the bed is so young—too young to have had a cardiac arrest. That’s what the nurses in the hallway said as they were leaving, and I agree.
Fuck. I didn’t even know she was in the hospital. Aiden never told me.
I keep going back to this, keep circling to the fact that I didn’t know. But of course I didn’t know. Who would have told me? How would I have known?
I knew Aiden’s father died. I picked up bits of mafia business when I spoke to my father during college. Things fell like scattered breadcrumbs, and I would absorb them, storing them away like I had any business knowing anything in the first place.
But I never knew about Aiden’s mother.
She has a pretty face. Laugh lines. I wonder what she taught her sons before she left them. I wonder if there was more she wanted to do.
There must have been. God, she’s so young.
Finn breaks the silence suddenly, a loud curse cracking through the air.
