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“Thank you,” I whisper.

He nods. “Be right back once I grab the nurse.” Those hazel eyes lock with mine. “I will be right outside the entire time, okay?”

Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

I push down the nerves that creep in at the thought of him leaving.

He needs to make some arrangements. I need to get the clearance to leave, and we need to get those pieces in motion before Dylan comes back.

I exhale, the beeping slows, and I nod. “Okay.”

“That’s my girl,” he murmurs.

Then he grunts softly as he pushes to his feet, and I see for the first time what he meant when he said he needed specialized orthopedic care.

His limp is intense.

And he’s clearly in pain.

But there’s pure grit in his expression as he uses the walker to move to the door.

“Hudson,” I murmur, and he pauses, glances over his shoulder at me.

“Yeah, Sleeping Beauty?”

“I’m sorry you’re hurt.”

A flicker of emotion across his face, one I can’t quite decipher, mostly because I’m still talking.

“But thank you for being willing to help me.”

His mouth quirks up. “This is where I’d normally shrug and say, ‘It’s what I do.’ But hobbling my butt around with a walker isn’t exactly what I do.”

I giggle softly. “No, I don’t imagine it is.”

Another flicker of emotion across his face, and this time the beeping echoing across the room isn’t from fear.

It’s for something else altogether.

“Be right back, princess.”

“Okay,” I whisper.

But I don’t miss that he waits until my pulse on the heart monitor has completely stabilized before he slips into the hall.

The next half hour goes by at warp speed.

The nurse comes in and takes my vitals, and then I’m visited by a very nice female doctor who is not the woman that Dylan was speaking to during the worst of the conversations I remember, not the woman who was working with him to fuel my nightmares, who had me sinking deeper into the fog.

She’s shrewd and calm and when Hudson hobbles back in and says that we’re both getting discharged and “the fuck out of here tonight” she barely bats an eye.

Instead, she nods and tells us that she’ll put the paperwork in.

It’s all both fast and slow—the decision made, the moving parts in place. There’s activity in my room and in the hall, where Hudson has been making quiet phone call after phone call, and there are long periods of quiet, where I’m stuck in the bed, just waiting.

I’m unhooked from the monitors, my stuff is packed up, and by the time Hudson comes back into the room and announces that our ride is here, I’m itching to get out of here.

Fatigue is creeping in.