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This was forever.
It took a second—maybe longer—for my eyes tomake sense of what I was seeing. But once they did, I couldn’t unsee it. The curve of his brow. The faint freckle near his temple. The way his hands, folded neatly over his stomach, still bore the wedding ring he’d worn since the day he married Mama. It was him. It was Daddy. And somehow that simple truth—that my brain had caught up with what my heart already knew—shattered the last fragile thread holding me upright.
I made a sound. Not a word. Not yet. Just something low and broken in the back of my throat.
The woman beside the curtain—the one in scrubs with a clipboard clutched to her chest—stepped a little closer. “Miss Calhoun,” she said gently, voice all sympathy and sterile professionalism. “Can you confirm the identity of the deceased?”
I nodded once, but that didn’t feel like enough. I opened my mouth, but my lips barely worked.
“It’s him,” I whispered. Then louder, so they’d know I wasn’t mistaken. So they could write it down, check their boxes, close whatever file they needed to. “It’s my daddy. Jamie Calhoun.”
And just like that, it became real. Legally, officially, in the eyes of the state and whatever clipboard that woman held.
I’d confirmed my father was gone.
The room spun.
I clawed at Noah’s chest, curled my fingers into his shirt and sobbed into the hollow of his neck like I could undo the world if I just held on hard enough. My screams echoed off the tile walls, too loud for a room that had known too much quiet. Too much death.
A woman behind the desk—one of the clerks, maybe, or a tech who’d seen more bodies than sunrises—pressed a hand to her mouth and turned away. Anotheremployee quietly stepped out of the room. I didn’t care who watched. I didn’t care who heard. I let the grief tear its way out of me, clawing up through my chest like it had been caged too long and wanted to ruin everything on its way out.
“I can’t—he’s not—he was just—” I couldn’t finish a thought. Couldn’t finish a sentence.
Noah said nothing. He just held me.
Solid.
Unmoving.
One arm wrapped tight around my back, the other cradling my head like he could shield me from the weight of it if he held me close enough. His chest didn’t rise with panic. His hands didn’t tremble. He didn’t flinch when I screamed so loud my voice cracked in half.
He just let me fall apart.
I don’t know how long I stood there, wailing into him, knees barely locked, body limp in his arms. Time blurred. Pain tunneled my vision. My face was wet with tears and spit, and I didn’t even care. My whole soul had unspooled right there in the morgue, and I couldn’t gather it back up.
At some point, someone gently re-covered Daddy’s face. Someone else dimmed the overhead light. Someone laid a hand on Noah’s shoulder and murmured something he didn’t respond to.
But all I heard was my own grief ringing in my ears. A sound I didn’t know I could make. A sound I didn’t think would ever leave me.
Eventually, I sagged hard against him, legs no longer holding me up. He eased us down, sitting on the edge of a bench along the wall, pulling me into his lap. I curled there, shaking and small, with his hand on my back and his lips near my temple.
“I’ve got you,” he said, voice low and sure. “You just breathe. That’s all you gotta do right now.”
But I couldn’t.
Not without the world I’d known five minutes ago, before someone pulled back a sheet and broke my heart in half.
Daddy was gone. And I was still breathing. Nothing about it felt fair.
I don’t know how I finally stopped crying.
I don’t know when the sobs slowed enough for me to breathe without tasting salt. I only know that eventually, I blinked and realized I was still sitting in Noah’s lap, my fingers tangled in his shirt, my cheek pressed to the steady rise and fall of his chest.
My throat was raw. My eyes felt like they’d been scoured from the inside. And still, the ache kept pulsing, low and merciless, like grief had made itself a second heartbeat.
It didn’t feel real yet. The shock came in waves—sharp, breathless, cruel—and every time I thought I’d surfaced, it pulled me back under.
Noah didn’t say anything. He just nodded against my temple and kept holding me like he could bear some of it for me. Maybe he could. Maybe he already was.