Chapter 166: Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Three — Everything...
Willow stood in the center of the bedroom with the phone still in her hand, the screen dark now, the call ended while her body lagged behind the fact of it.
For several seconds, nothing moved—not her feet, not her breath, not even her thoughts. The room remained exactly as it had been before the phone rang: the crib by the window, the folded blanket on the chair, the quiet hum of the city beyond the glass.
That was the cruelty of it.
Nothing had changed, and everything had.
Her chest tightened as though something had cinched inward and refused to release. It was not pain so much as pressure, the kind that made breathing feel optional, like a courtesy her body had temporarily withdrawn.
She stood there long enough to notice the small things she would later realize she had memorized without meaning to. A faint crease in the bedsheet where Zana had kicked in her sleep earlier. The line of sunlight on the carpet that marked the hour precisely. The smell of clean laundry lingering faintly in the air. These details pressed themselves into her awareness with an insistence that felt almost aggressive, as though the room were determined to prove its normalcy in the face of everything else.
ICU.
Advanced.
Ventilator.
The words refused to line up into anything coherent. They scattered instead, colliding with the version of Zane she had spoken to the night before—tired, hoarse, dismissing the cough with that familiar half-smile she could hear even through the phone.
Just a cold.
The lie had been gentle. That was what made it dangerous.
She pressed her thumb hard into the edge of the phone, grounding herself in the sharpness of it, as if sensation might anchor reality back into place. The plastic edge bit into her skin, a small, controllable pain. She welcomed it. Pain, at least, had rules.
Nine a.m.
He had collapsed at nine a.m.
Her mind lurched backward, reconstructing the morning she had lived while his body had given out in a conference room hundreds of miles away. Coffee. Emails. Zana’s bottle warming on the counter. The ordinary choreography of a life that had believed it had time.
She pictured him standing at a table she had never seen, mid-sentence, mid-thought, the room full of people who knew his authority but not his limits. She imagined the moment his body betrayed him—how long it had hesitated, how long pride had tried to hold the line before gravity won. The image made her throat close.
Her stomach turned.
She drew in a breath too quickly, then another that stalled halfway, her lungs hesitating as though they were unsure whether this qualified as an emergency yet. It took conscious effort to slow herself, to insist on air the way she insisted on everything else she needed.
Zana stirred in the crib.
The sound broke something open.
Willow crossed the room in three strides and rested her hand against the rail, fingers curling around the smooth wood as if it were the only stable thing left. She watched her daughter sleep, the rise and fall of her chest steady and unquestioning.
Alive.
Unaware.
Safe—for now.
The weight of that last qualifier settled heavily in her chest.
"I didn’t know," Willow whispered, not to Zana, not even to herself, but to the empty air. "I didn’t know it was this bad."
Even as the words left her, she knew they were only partly true.
She had known he was sick. She had heard the cough, noticed the pauses, recognized the strain he pretended was nothing. She had let him minimize it because distance made confrontation feel impractical, because calling him out would have meant admitting that separation was not neutral.
She had chosen quiet over friction. Distance over insistence.
She closed her eyes.
This was the cost of waiting.
Her phone vibrated in her hand.
This time, she looked.
A message from Lorrlyne.
No improvement. Oxygen needs increased slightly. He is still stable.
Still stable.
The phrase felt thin, stretched tight over something dangerous, like a floorboard that had not yet given way but already warned it would. It was not reassurance. It was a pause.
Willow exhaled slowly and felt the internal shift occur—not panic, not collapse, but alignment. The part of her that had been holding still, afraid that movement would make the truth irreversible, finally released.
If she moved, it would become real.
If she stayed, it already was.
She straightened, set the phone down, and moved.
She crossed to the closet and pulled the suitcase out without ceremony, the larger one, the one she had last used when she left Atlanta for Los Angeles, believing she was closing a Chapter rather than circling back to it.
The irony did not escape her.
She paused for a fraction of a second, one hand on the handle, the memory of that earlier departure flickering through her mind—how controlled she had been then, how convinced she was that distance could be managed like a variable.
This time, there was no illusion of control. Only response.
The zipper sounded loud in the quiet room.
Good. Let the quiet break.
Her hands moved with a steadiness that surprised her. Diapers. Wipes. Formula. Bottles. Zana’s blanket, the soft one that smelled like home. Her own clothes—practical, layered, chosen for speed rather than sentiment.
She did not pack options. She packed necessities.
She packed as if this were muscle memory, as if some deeper instinct had already accepted what was happening and had simply been waiting for her mind to stop arguing.
Zana woke as Willow folded the last set of sleepers, letting out a soft, confused protest.
Willow lifted her gently and held her close, breathing her in, anchoring herself to the warmth and weight of her daughter. The baby’s fingers curled instinctively into the fabric of her shirt, trusting without question.
"I know," she murmured, rocking slightly. "I know. This wasn’t supposed to be today."
Zana settled against her shoulder, warm and solid.
The sting of tears came then—sharp and immediate—but Willow did not let them slow her. Tears were allowed. Stopping was not.
She pressed her lips to Zana’s hair.
"Daddy is sick," she said quietly. "And we’re going to him."
The sentence landed with a finality that left no room for retreat.
From that moment on, nothing paused again.
