It took two days to bring him back.
Not suddenly. Not cleanly. Not with the kind of clarity people liked to imagine when they thought of waking.
The doctors called it weaning sedation, a phrase so clinical it almost disguised what it meant. It meant backing away, millimeter by millimeter, from the drugs that had been holding Zane still enough for his lungs to heal. It meant watching carefully for agitation, confusion, panic. It meant accepting that the body did not like being dragged back into awareness after surrender.
For Willow, it meant waiting in fragments.
She spent that day split between two rooms, two versions of love that demanded everything in different ways.
