-Prologue-

He should have told her. He should have held her and reassured her of how much he still loves her. He should have accepted her apologies, given in to her like he always had before. He should have taken her home with him and forgotten the past. He shouldn't have left her alone, he shouldn't have forced himself to walk away just when he saw the tears begin to show in her eyes. He shouldn't have abandoned her, rejected her. He should have been the husband he knew that deep down he still was. If he had, she wouldn't have been there. She would have been with him. She would have been safe.

Instead, she hadn't been safe, not that either of them had known it at the time. He'd been home a couple of hours when he got the call, and for a brief moment had considered not answering the phone, needing time to himself to deal with all she had said to him, all that he had said to her, but he'd never been one to ignore a phone call. He'd answered, and his world had come crashing down.

The steady bleep had been the only real sound in the room for almost an hour, the last nurse to check on her due to stop by again any time now, and it had been what he had chosen to focus on for those first agonising hours. As long as the rhythm was steady, she was stable, that was how it worked, right? As long as it was steady, she was okay. Except she wasn't. She was lying unresponsive in a hospital bed, recovering from a surgery she likely didn't know she'd even had, battered and bruised with a temporary cast on her leg. She wasn't okay. She was broken, and this time he knew he couldn't fix it. He couldn't fix this by talking to her. By listening to her. It killed him to know that he could have prevented it had he done those things just that morning.

He knew that the guilt he felt for following his head instead of his heart wasn't going to change anything, but blaming himself was all he had. One different decision and they could have been happy in that moment, they could have been settling back into their life together. Instead she was unconscious, and he was desperately waiting for answers from doctors that didn't really know what to tell him – they didn't know if she'd live, or what the lasting effects would be if she did. She was critical.

He kept replaying the day in his mind, her pleas, the panic he felt when he realised what she was asking of him. The rejection that had come from his selfish need to protect himself. If he'd have known that what he had really needed to protect them both from was so close, he'd have held her, and he'd have never let her go. He'd been relieved at first, when the charred images of the diner they had met at had been plastered on his TV screen, the reports of the unexplained explosion making him feel lucky that he had not still been there. Then the call came.

He hadn't known that she had still been there. He had left hours before, it didn't make sense to him that she wouldn't have also left. He'd assumed it was a mistake, that she'd left her purse and they'd misidentified someone who had been near it by her ID. He had held on to that while on the way to the hospital, reassuring himself that it wasn't her, she had left, she was safe, that this near miss could be the wakeup call that jolted him out of his selfish thoughts, that got him following his heart once again. That he'd call her and apologise, that he'd tell her that of course she could come home, she didn't even need to ask. He was so convinced of it that he wasn't prepared when he came face to face with the reality, he hadn't been ready to see her battered, unconscious form when he had finally been able to see her. There was no doubt. It was her.

Everything else had been a blur. He had a vague recollection of being told that they had almost lost her in surgery, that her injuries were extensive, that it was lucky that she had not been closer to the blast, or she'd never have made it to hospital. He'd been told to eat, to go home and sleep, to look after himself, but he couldn't leave her. He'd done that just that morning, stupidly assuming that when he'd given himself time to adjust to what she wanted, they'd have another chance. He couldn't leave her again.

His thumb kept gliding aimlessly over her hand, as if the action could gain a response. It was what he was focusing on. She was there, and he hoped she could feel him, he hoped she knew she wasn't alone. He wanted nothing more than for her to roll her eyes at his hovering, make a sarcastic remark about his earlier rejection, anything to show him she was okay. He wanted to be able to block out the sounds of the hospital and focus on her breathing. He didn't want to hear the bleeping as it changed to a dull, long hum, the terrifying sound of the rushed footsteps, the warning alarms alerting the doctors that their patient needed them. He didn't want to lose her.