“I know I’m going to regret this moment,” she says quietly, her tone still flat, in shock.

“What do you mean?” I ask, reaching for her hand. It’s cold and limp in mine.

She blinks a few times, then studies my face, her eyes pausing at my nose, my lips. “I know that in the future, when things settle down, in whatever way, I’m going to look back at this moment and I’m going to regret that I didn’t take it all in. That I didn’t see who was standing in front of me. That I’m going to wish I could recall your face.” She shakes her head and a single tear spills down her cheek. “None of this is sinking in. That I’m leaving. I don’t know what’s going to happen. With her. With us.”

I raise her hand, flipping her palm up and kissing it. “Your mother is going to be fine. You’ll get there and she’s going to be fine. She’ll know you’re there. She’ll pull through, okay? And us. We’ll be fine too. You’ll come back to Scotland when she’s better, love.”

But as soon as I say the words, I see the look in her eyes. The look that says she doesn’t know. The look that said that maybe she was planning on leaving anyway.

Sorrow carves a path through my chest.

She was never planning on staying.

It takes all my strength to stop from collapsing to the ground, right there in the airport.

“I’m sorry,” she says to me.

I try to smile. I fail. “Don’t be.”

“I love you, you know.”

My vision blurs. “I love you too.” But my voice cracks and it’s all too obvious that I’m being decimated from the inside out.

This is probably the last time I’ll ever see her again.

And now I know I’ll regret this moment too.

For not forcing myself on her plane.

For messing everything up and preventing us from having a chance.

For letting her go.

I can’t let her go.

With tears in my eyes, I grab her face and kiss her hard on the lips, letting all my love, all my cares, all my pain melt into her, as if she could take all of me with her.

I let out a soft sob against her mouth, my hands starting to shake.

This is the end.

We’re both so blindsided.

She pulls away from me first, sniffing hard, mascara underneath her eyes. “I have to go,” she whispers.

Then she turns away.

Walks away.

Disappears behind the security partition.

And I’m lost in the distance between us.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Kayla

The flight attendant is telling me to buckle my seat belt but I barely hear her. I can barely move my fingers, they are so cold. I feel like a block of ice, numb to the marrow, but I think it’s keeping me alive, keeping me from losing my mind to worry and grief. So I welcome the way I move, slow motion, underwater. I hope it wraps around me for all the time to come.

If I try and think about any of it, it creates cracks down my middle and I am trying so hard to hold it all together. On one hand there is my mother, in a coma, on the threshold of life and death and none of that would have happened if I had been there. It’s my fault through and through that this happened and I have no one to blame but myself.

On the other hand there is Lachlan, the man I love, the man with demons I can’t fight, that fight me back, and I left him. I left him in Scotland and I left our relationship broken with no chance of repair. I might never see him again and that too, even for all his faults and his self-ruin and his terrible addictions, feels like a death as well.

Shut it down, I think to myself. Bring up that big black heart and shut it all down.

It’s a shame. But it’s the only way I’m going to get through this in one piece, even though I know I’ve already left a vital part behind in Scotland.

When my plane finally lands in San Francisco, I’m a walking statue. The only thing that gets through is seeing my brother Nikko, along with Stephanie, waiting in arrivals.

“Oh, honey,” Stephanie says softly when she sees me, running toward me with open arms. She holds onto me tight, sniffing into me and it takes so much to not break down and lose it. I have to stay strong though, because if just seeing her makes me cry, I’m not going to get through the next few days.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, pulling back. Her eyes are swollen from tears. “Toshio called me and told me what happened, said Nikko was going to pick you up. I had to come along.” She looks around me. “Lachlan couldn’t come?”

I shake my head. I can’t even explain.

She winces. “It’s okay. I’m here. We’re all here for you. Nicola, Bram, Linden. We’ll get you through this.”

I nod, appreciating it more than anything. I look over at Nikko and give him a soft smile.

Nikko is the second oldest, a really smart software engineer with a wife and a toddler. He’s always been the quiet one, the calm one, the old soul, and I’m glad he’s the one who came to get me. Nikko always provides the right amount of comfort.

“Kayla,” he says, embracing me. “I should have been there. We should have done more.”

I shake my head. “No. I was wrong to leave.”

“No,” he says adamantly, pulling back. He stares intently at me. “Kayla you have done so much for her. So much. Her sons just haven’t been there and we should have been. We should have never let you take on so much by yourself.”

Oh god. Now his eyes are watering. I can’t do this.

I turn away. “Let’s just go. Please. I need to see her.”

The drive to the hospital feels surreal. It just doesn’t seem like anything other than a bad dream. Then again, the last twenty-four hours have been a nightmare, with Lachlan starting it all. My eyes pinch shut at the image of him dropping to his knees, holding onto me for dear life as he sobbed his apologies. I knew he meant it all. I knew he did. But the damage was already done.

My beautiful beast. I don’t think I’ll ever see him again.

I lean forward, curling over the pain and Stephanie reaches forward from the back seat, rubbing my arm, telling me it will be all right. She doesn’t even know the half of it.

Once at the hospital, we go upstairs and I’m hit by the painful wails, the sterile smells, that heaviness in the air. Each step we take down the hall seems longer than the first and there’s a part of me that starts to panic, wondering if it will all be too late by the time I get there.

Eventually we get to the ICU and see Paul and Brian in a small waiting room, talking to the doctors. I give them quick hugs as they tell me Toshio is on his way, had to drop off Sean somewhere.

The doctor, a tall blonde woman with a no-nonsense face, proceeds to tell me everything as Steph holds my hand.

My mother appeared to have a major stroke, blood clot in the brain.

Toshio came over to the house and found her unresponsive on the kitchen floor, called an ambulance.

They’d said the damage so far points to her being on that floor for a very long time.

In the back of my head I think about when I rang her to tell her my news.

And she never answered.

Could that have already been it? Could I have been so selfish in my desire to stay with Lachlan that I was calling her up to tell her this while she was suffering from a fucking stroke?

Loathing myself has reached another level.

The doctor then tells us that she’s been put into a medically induced coma in hopes of keeping the swelling down. The coma shuts down everything in the brain so that in extreme cases such as this one the brain has a chance to recover.

“And what are the chances of recovery?” I ask quietly. I glance around at my brothers’ faces and I’m hit with how grim they look. They already know. Of course they already know. The chances aren’t good.

The doctor gives me a tight smile. “We can’t say for sure yet. It depends…if the swelling recedes, then we can try and lighten up the coma and see if she can come back and what her level of function is.”