The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 120

Chapter 108: Hospital Confessions

Caleb POV

+25 Points

Three cracked ribs and a laceration requiring eight stitches – that was what the doctor told me, and Bella had opened her eyes just long enough to tell the nurse she didn’t need that much fuss before the sedative pulled her back under.

They let me stay with her after. I dragged a chair to the side of the bed and didn’t move from it.

I’d taken her hand before she went unconscious and kept holding it after, because letting go wasn’t something I was capable of doing. Not tonight.

The hospital was quiet at this hour. Through the window, the city glittered and indifferent as ever, and I sat in that plastic chair watching Bella breathe, refusing to let myself revisit the fifteen minutes in the parking garage before my team confirmed the crane yard coordinates. The particular intensity of not knowing if I would be too late. I wasn’t going to think about that.

Maya brought Tom at eleven. She stood in the doorway with his hand in hers, his face wearing the particular confusion of a child who’s been woken and dressed and driven somewhere without a full explanation. He looked at Bella in the bed. Then he looked at me.

“Is Mommy going to be okay?” he asked.

I got down to his level – one knee on the linoleum – and looked at my son’s face. Bella’s amber flecks in eyes that were otherwise mine. Her line of worry between his brows, already forming at four years old. “She’s going to be completely okay. She’s sleeping so her ribs can rest.”

Tom considered this as his brows arched”My ribs got bruised when I fell off the climbing frame,” he said. “Mommy said I had to be very careful and boring for a week.”

“She has to be very careful and boring for a little longer than that.”

“She’s going to hate that.”

“She absolutely will,” I agreed.

Apparently satisfied, Tom crawled up into the chair on the other side of Bella’s bed and curled himself against her arm, eyes already closing, Within ten minutes he was out.

Maya looked at me from the doorway for a long moment.”She’s going to be angry she didn’t handle it herself,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

“Are you going to let her be angry?”

“I’m going to let her be whatever she needs to be.” I looked at Bella’s face – slack and young in sleep in a

way it almost never was when she was awake and managing everything. “I just need her to be here to be

it.”

Maya nodded once and left us.

1/3

< Chapter 103 Hospital Confessions

Bella woke at four in the morning. I knew because I hadn’t slept.

+25 Points

She surfaced slowly, the way of someone coming back from somewhere sedated, and her first instinct – even before she was fully conscious was to reach for Tom. He’d somehow migrated to her other side in the night without waking anyone and was sprawled across a third of the bed with his shoes still on. Her hand found him and she exhaled before her eyes were even open.

Then she saw me. I was still in the chair’d taken off my jacket at some point, rolled my sleeves up, and was holding a coffee cup that had been empty for hours. I’d stopped pretending to drink from it around two AM.

“You stayed,” she said. Her voice was rough from the sedative.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t have to stay all night.”

“I know.”

She looked at me for a moment- and something in her expression shifted. “You look terrible,” she said.

“That’s fair.” I set the cup down. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I have a few cracked ribs.” She tried to shift and winced. “And like I was an idiot.”

“You were cautious, you didn’t have full information.” I kept my voice even, because the fear was still in my chest at a volume I wasn’t going to inflict on her while she was in a hospital bed. “The sender covered their tracks well enough to fool a preliminary check. You weren’t wrong to go but you were wrong to go alone.”

‘I nearly texted you.”

“You can finish that thought differently next time.”

She looked at me again, and then at Tom, and her face did that thing it always did around our son – softened in a way she couldn’t fully control and had mostly stopped trying to. Tom stirred, made a small sound, settled again.

“You told him I was okay,” she said.

“Immediately.”

“Thank you.” She looked back at me. “He asked if I was going to be okay, didn’t he.”

“He also told me you’d hate being careful and boring.”

The corner of her mouth curved. Then she looked at me with the steadiness she’d carried through everything for as long as I’d known her, and said, “Say what you’re not saying.”

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and looked at my hands for a moment before I looked at her.

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