It took two days to remove the ventilator.
Two days that felt longer than the weeks that had come before, stretched thin by vigilance and restraint and the constant discipline of not hoping too loudly. Hope, Willow learned, had weight. It demanded energy she was not always sure she had, so she rationed it carefully, allowing herself only what was necessary to keep going.
The first day was preparation.
Sedation reduced in careful increments. Zane drifting in and out, never fully alert, never fully gone. His breathing watched relentlessly, numbers rising and dipping in ways that made nurses pause, adjust, wait. Willow learned the rhythm of it, learned when a shallow breath meant effort and when it meant fatigue. She learned the difference between a cough that worried and one that reassured. She learned the sound his lungs made when they protested, a faint rasp beneath the stethoscope that did not yet belong to health but no longer belonged to crisis either.
