When Alex passed out, he thought that was the end. That was it for him, all she wrote, and considering the amount of pain wracking his body, he had to be okay with it. Not that he was ready to check out, far from it, but he’d have given in to almost anything to make the pain stop. At least the last thing he saw was Sol’s face.

At least he had the absolute certainty that Sol cared. He hadn’t had that before. The anguished look on Sol’s face as darkness closed in had hurt, because Alex didn’t want Sol to be in pain. Any doubts he had about Sol’s love for him were gone now. It was a little late in the day for that to be at all useful to him, but those were small details he guessed.

Consciousness didn’t return all at once, like it did on TV. He first became aware of himself by floating on a sea of feelings, which wasn’t something he quite knew how to process. He was an action kind of guy. He had feelings, of course. He was a normal guy. He thought things, he felt things. He just didn’t wallow in them.

Now here in the dark, whether it was the afterlife or in his own head, all he could do was feel. He remembered his mother, not as she’d been the last time he’d seen her but as she’d been when he’d been a little boy. He remembered the way she smelled, the cheap shampoo she used that always brought a little smile to his face. He still used that shampoo. It made him feel comfortable and safe, and it saved a bunch of money too.

He liked the comfort and safety, and he could have stayed there for a good long time, but something pulled him away. He had no control over himself here. He didn’t even have a body. He drifted along to that cold, awful moment when Mom shot his father. She’d done the right thing under the circumstances. He could feel the blood dripping down his face as he stared at the smoking barrel of the gun. The scent of gunpowder scorched his non-existent nostrils. He would always hate that smell.

He didn’t even try to fight when that same force pulled him along. He relived the misery of his first few nights in foster care, while he still had the concussion. He drowned in the guilt of settling into life in the foster home. The guilt became a physical thing, sickly yellow and filling his mouth and lungs like real water.

He watched himself moving to high school and dedicating himself to his work. He double concentrated, to increase his chances of having a job when he got out. Resignation buoyed him as the guilt tried to pull him under again. Sure, going to college would be nice. He couldn’t afford it, and he would age out of foster care just after finishing high school.

He saw himself meeting Sol in soft, fuzzy tones of love and contentment. The edges of the images were tinged with yellow—guilt for finding happiness when his mother rotted away in jail, guilt for finding love when Buddy had not. Fear, because what if Sol figured out he could do so much better than a hood rat with no family?

Browns and grays from despair took over when Sol left, tinged with red rage at Sol’s suggestion he become Sol’s side guy. Now, with the detachment of the probably-dead, Alex could understand where Sol was coming from. It was still the wrong thing to suggest, but Sol had little real choice about marrying Stuart. He was dependent on his father and refusing would have resulted in ruin. Alex didn’t need Sol’s dad’s money, but Sol at least thought he did.

Sol was offering a solution that worked for a lot of families in his class. Alex would never have said yes, but it wasn’t something to hold over Sol anymore. Alex could follow the logic.

The colors in the scene shifted as understanding dawned, changing to a sad but soft lavender.

Alex seemed to speed through the next ten years. He saw the men he’d been with, the friends he’d made. He saw himself coming into Jimmy Senior’s orbit and he saw himself opening the occasional lock or safe for him. He saw himself becoming friends with Pauline.

He saw himself meeting Carsten for the first time. He saw himself rescuing Maya. He saw his first time with Sol after ten years. He saw himself arguing with Sol about the baby, and then going downstairs to tell Carsten the good news.

Here the colors were joyful pinks and fuchsias. All of them. Alex was warm and happy and content, and he never wanted to leave.

Then he saw the shooting. His arms ached from being over his head for so long, and his wrists throbbed. Lena had tied them too tight, but Alex didn’t dare move. He hadn’t wanted to give them a reason to hurt the others.

Then there was the searing pain, and blackness. Alex thought he might have lost consciousness when he went through all of that again.

The next time he became aware of anything, it was a physical sensation instead of a feeling. The physical sensation was pain, although the pain was muted. His face throbbed dully, and once he managed to convince his brain to focus he realized it was actually his jaw.

Lena brought the butt of her gun across his face with a loud crack. Pain exploded in his jaw, and he knew it was broken.

Okay. He was probably alive if someone had decided to mute the pain. That meant drugs, and hardcore painkillers too. He cursed, mentally. He would have told them not to give him anything, given his father’s history with addiction. And drugs of any kind were probably bad for the baby.

Stuart aimed his gun. Sol yelled like a man possessed and tackled Stuart, but it was too late. The bullet tore through Alex’s belly and left burning agony in its wake.

Oh.

He tried to open his eyes. After three or four tries, he managed to make them flicker open.

His hospital room was dimly lit. Alex didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. The walls were painted a nice, soft pink color behind all of the monitors, nozzles, and hoses. Every one of those tools seemed to be hooked up to Alex in some way.

Alex slid his hand over to the bedrail. His mind was still fuzzy, and he wasn’t exactly a hospital aficionado, but he’d been in enough of them through his work with the domestic violence network. He knew there had to be a switch to raise the bed somewhere. He needed to assess the situation, and a bullet in his gut made sitting up a poor idea if not an outright impossibility.

Sol slept in a little fold-out chair near Alex’s bed. He had about three days worth of stubble filling in around his fussy little goatee, and he wore hospital scrubs. The trash can beside him overflowed with coffee cups. Alex wanted to say something about how bad that was for the environment, but his jaw was wired shut.

Besides, Sol was sleeping. From the look of things, he probably needed it.

Alex stared at the ceiling for a while, watching it go in and out of focus like it was the most novel thing he’d ever seen in his life. Maybe the baby could have been saved. The uterus was supposed to be resilient, right? It was supposed to fight to hold an embryo in, not to expel it at the first sign of a little bit of trouble.

Or, you know. A bullet, directly to it.

He barely noticed when tears leaked out of his eyes. He did notice that his heart monitor changed rhythm just a little bit, but he didn’t take much note of it. It was just a background noise, until a short woman with dark skin walked into the room. She wore magenta scrubs and a gentle smile. “You’re awake,” she said in a soft voice.

Sol jumped up from his chair. “Who’s awake?”

Alex managed to wave a hand. “Hey.” He barely managed to get the word out. He’d never tried to speak without moving his jaw before. It was harder than it looked.

Sol stared. His jaw dropped. “Alex.” He leaped over to Alex’s bedside and took his hand. “You have no idea how good it is to see those eyes of yours.”

Alex tried to swallow, but his throat was dry. “Carsten? Maya? You? Inge?”

Sol stroked his hand. “Carsten and Maya are with Jimmy Senior. Carsten has called every day, sometimes twice, to check up on you.” He sighed. “He likes staying with Grandpa Jimmy. He likes the Bronx, and he likes the food. Apparently I’ve been depriving him, because all children like meatballs.” Sol rolled his eyes. “Inge has a serious concussion. She’s in another room, but we think she’ll recover.”

Alex let his body relax. Everyone was safe. Jimmy Senior would keep the kids as safe as humanly possible, and Carsten would enjoy his company. It would be good for him to get out around some kids who weren’t private school types, too. It was good for him to know that not everyone lived the way he did.

“I’ve been here. Right here. They tried to send me home a couple of times,” Sol added, with a glance at the nurse, “but I wasn’t going to budge. I did use your shower.”

“We’re all grateful,” the nurse added with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “How are you feeling right now, Alex? You don’t have to say anything. You can give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I know the wire is probably a lot to get used to.”

Alex wagged his hand from side to side, indicating “so-so.”

The nurse, whose badge identified her as Margaret Shaw, NP, nodded. “We’ve got you on some pretty powerful painkillers, and you’re probably a little funky from blood loss yet. I don’t mind telling you, you were pretty messed up. Are you ready to hear about it, or do you want to hold off for now?”

Alex took as deep a breath as he could, considering the tube helping him breathe, and nodded. A pit had formed in the middle of his stomach, and he thought maybe holding off might be the better idea, but he needed to know for sure.

“Okay. You were brought in with a gunshot wound to your lower abdomen. You’d lost a lot of blood, you weren’t breathing, and you had a broken jaw. We were advised of your pregnancy by your fiancé, but I do regret to inform you that we weren’t able to save the pregnancy.” She bowed her head. “It was too early, and the bullet did too much damage. If we’re being honest, you probably lost the baby before you even made it to the hospital.”

Shaw put her hand on Alex’s other side. “This is hard for you to hear. I’m sorry about that. ”

Alex closed his eyes. “Guessed.” He tried to blink his tears away, but it didn’t work. They just came on harder. “Drugs.”

“Yeah. Yeah, they don’t usually give these kind of drugs to people who are pregnant.” Shaw managed a small smile and moved on. “I’ll ask someone from Omega Medicine to come and talk to you about specifics, what to expect going forward and what this means for your future fertility. I have some information, but we keep those folks on the payroll for a reason.” She winked at him. “Now, as for you. You’re in very rough shape, Alex.”

“You lost a lot of blood, enough that you coded twice. Once in the ambulance and once on the operating table. That’s not good. There are some long-term effects to keep an eye on when someone has to be defibrillated, but it’s obviously better than the alternative.”

Alex couldn’t be sure about that, especially if he didn’t know what those effects were. He couldn’t give voice to those thoughts, though. After a moment’s pause, he realized the thoughts weren’t even his. “Depression?” he managed.

“That’s one of them. It’s very, very normal after a life threatening event like the one you just experienced. Keep an eye on it.” Shaw snapped her gaze over to Sol. “Both of you keep an eye on it. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not anyone’s ‘fault.’ It’s a normal response to everything he’s gone through. Losing a pregnancy on top of it just makes it worse, but it’s something he can get through with help. So be there for him, and help him.”

“You’ve had major abdominal surgery. That means no lifting anything heavy for a minimum of four weeks. I understand you have two little ones at home?”

Alex looked away. Stuart hadn’t killed him, but he’d taken everything away anyway. “Yeah.”

“Okay, you can’t lift them. Unless, of course, they weigh less than ten pounds. If someone else lifts them, you can hold them. You’ll be on a liquid diet until your jaw heals, of course, but you’re not going to want solid food for a little while anyway.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Do you have any questions for me?”

He closed his eyes. “Am I fired?” he asked, struggling to form the words.

Sol cleared his throat. “Production has been paused. Not halted. We wouldn’t fire anyone who had to pause for medical reasons, never mind a tragedy like this. But Alex, you have the additional bonus of being engaged to the EVP in charge, so no. You’re not fired. You just have a new assignment for a few weeks, which is to rest and heal.”

Alex squeezed Sol’s hand. Would he still want to marry Alex if Alex wasn’t carrying his baby anymore?

Shaw patted his hand. “I can see you two have a lot to discuss. Remember, you need your rest more than anything else right now.” She left the room.

Alex turned to look at Sol, who looked back at him. “I was so scared, Alex. I mean your heart stopped beating, right in front of me.”

Alex looked into Sol’s eyes and saw the truth. He had been terrified. He’d been scared for Alex. He’d probably been scared for the baby, too, but Alex had been the center of his fear.

He reached out to touch Sol’s face, and Sol bent down so he could reach it. “Love you,” Alex managed.

Sol leaned into Alex’s touch. “I love you too, Alex. Don’t you dare forget that. And no scaring me again, okay?”

Alex managed a little grin. “Okay.”

* * *

Sol wanted to send up balloons and fireworks when Alex opened his eyes. He didn’t. The hospital had sent a social worker around only a few hours before to give him the lowdown on some of what might be going through Alex’s mind as he recovered, and none of it made boisterous celebration seem like a great idea.

The social worker, Annalise Glenn, had sat down with him while Alex’s eyes twitched beneath their lids. “So, you’re kind of dealing with a double whammy,” she told Sol. “Alex is dealing with a miscarriage, which is its own kind of trauma even when it isn’t caused by violence. There are a bunch of different hormones flooding his system right now and he has no outlet for them.”

“Then there’s the other trauma. Alex is coping with the trauma of having been abducted, held hostage, and then shot. And I believe you mentioned there are other traumas in his background too?”

Sol wanted nothing more than to curl around Alex’s unconscious body and reassure himself Alex was still in there somewhere, but he forced himself to focus. “Yeah. Abusive father, mother killed said father to protect them both, mother in jail, mother recently murdered—”

“Yikes. It sounds like he’s a pretty strong guy, but this is a lot for one guy to take. He’s going to have a lot to process, and he’s going to need your support. But it sounds like he’s been on his own for a while.”

“He’s got some support, but yeah. He’s…It’s complicated, but he’s never been the best at asking for help.” Sol looked over at his fiancé, still on his bed.

“He may be resistant. That’s going to require some patience from you. I know popular culture likes to paint survivors as good little victims, patient and smiling and perfect, but literally nothing works like that. He may be angry, he may have outbursts where he’s just hostile and irrational, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“He’d have every right to be mad at me. It was my ex that did this to him. Stuart would never have gone after him if it weren’t for me.”

So when Alex did wake up, Sol thought he was prepared for anything. He didn’t expect Alex to just want to touch his face, or just to hold hands in silence.

For the first day or so, the silence bugged Sol. He didn’t want to say anything to Alex about it, but something about it made him itch deep inside his spine. Alex hadn’t ever been a quiet guy. He wasn’t brash, or a braggart, but if something was on his mind he said it. He usually did something about it too.

A day after Alex woke up, they took the catheter out—an event that sounded painful even with Alex’s jaw wired shut—and insisted he try to walk around as much as he could. He needed to force his muscles to work again, one literal step at a time. Alex was eager, until he fell down on his way to the bathroom.

He was still eager after that, but it was an angry determination.

He asked for a pen and a notepad, and he wrote notes. That was how Sol figured out the silence had been due in part to the jaw Lena had broken.

The first sentence he wrote, in his spidery, slapdash scrawl, was where are Lena and Stuart?

Sol read it and tugged at his collar. “Lena’s at Riker’s Island. She’s not leaving. The judge denied her bail. Her lawyer tried to argue for bail, but given she’s

already violated the terms of her bail on one other case and violated multiple restraining orders the judge wasn’t feeling lenient.” He cleared his throat. “The judge might have had a chat with Jimmy Senior. I couldn’t confirm or deny anything, so don’t ask me to. Especially in writing.”

Alex managed a little smirk at that. He hadn’t smiled since he woke up, so Sol decided to count it as a win.

Sol continued, using the little flutter of joy from that win to propel him through. “Stuart is dead. Detective Staley shot him. I saw the autopsied body myself, because I still couldn’t believe we were safe.” He lowered his gaze. “I’m a little conflicted about that. It was for the best. It had to happen, and I’d rather it was him than you. I still feel bad that he’s dead. I hated him by the end, and I never did want to marry him. He was still my husband once, and the father of my child.”

Alex nodded, and blinked back tears. Me too. He did bad things, and I’m not a fan of the GSW, but I still feel kind of sorry for him.

Sol nodded. Maybe in another time and another place, Stuart could have gotten the help he needed and found happiness. In the end, though, he’d made his own choices.

Alex got moved to a regular care floor, although he still had a private room. In fact, his room was right next to Inge’s. It gave Inge some comfort, at least. Alex just hung his head and wrote I’m sorry a thousand times on his notepad, but Inge hugged him and told him it wasn’t his fault. “The only people to blame here,” she said, speaking very slowly because of the concussion, “are Stuart and Lena. And maybe Alden, because no one’s going to convince me he’s not into this up to his eyeballs, but whatever. You and me, we are innocent. We survived. We kept the children safe, and that’s our job.”

Once Alex was on a regular ward, he asked Sol for two things. I need real pajamas. And I want to see the kids.

Sol could understand the need for pajamas. The hospital johnnies were drafty as heck, and they lacked dignity. The kids threw him for a loop, though. “Are you sure, honey? They’re kind of loud and all over the place.”

I don’t want them to forget me.

Sol wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with that.

He called Jimmy Senior, who brought both children and pajamas from the Bronx. Sol helped Alex change. He was getting to be more independent every day, but all of the IVs and monitors connected to him needed more management than one pair of hands could manage.

Carsten’s clothes were all in the Vesuvius, which was still a crime scene, but Jimmy Senior hadn’t let that stop him. Carsten didn’t look at all distinguishable from any other Bronx kid now. He had jeans with stained knees from playing on the playground, and he wore a tee shirt that proudly proclaimed him to be a “proud Bronx boy,” and had a wool cap just like the one Jimmy Senior wore. He bounced with delight in the hallway outside Alex’s room and raced inside.

He climbed up into Alex’s bed and showed off his shirt. Now Alex did smile, for real. He wrapped one arm around Carsten as he snuggled into his side and held his other arm out for a delightedly squealing Maya.

Sol explained why Alex wasn’t talking to Carsten. Jimmy Senior and Buddy, who came along with him, had probably already given them the rundown, but Sol had to be sure Carsten understood. Carsten just nodded and pressed himself closer into Alex’s side.

Jimmy and Buddy gave Alex and Sol a rundown of what the kids had been up to while they’d been at the hospital. Carsten had happily learned to play stick ball and kick-the-can, neither of which Sol had even heard of. Maya followed Carsten pretty much everywhere, and Carsten tolerated it with his usual good nature.

“That’s just what babies do, Alex,” he explained. “That’s how they learn. It’s okay if she wants to learn from me. She’s my little sister.”

That had brought a fresh round of tears from Alex, not that he made a sound. They just leaked from his eyes like he couldn’t control them, and maybe he couldn’t.

It wasn’t all lollipops and sunshine for Carsten, and Sol didn’t expect it would be. Jimmy Senior told him Carsten had nightmares every night, bad enough that he was waking up two or three times per night. He jumped every time he saw a strange car and made a point of getting between Maya and anyone he didn’t know. Sol knew he was going to have to get help for his son, real professional help. He asked the social worker for some recommendations and settled in for the long haul.

The visit from the kids seemed to galvanize Alex. He had more energy on an order of magnitude greater than he’d had before the visit, and it was time to start thinking about bringing both him and Inge home. The only question was where to bring them?

Carsten absolutely refused to set foot in the Vesuvius ever again. Sol tried to talk to him about it, but on this the kid wouldn’t budge. “The blood is all cleaned up, sweetheart. You won’t have to see it anymore.”

“I’ll always see it,” the little boy told him. “It will always be there. I can’t.”

Sol decided not to push it. The penthouse would sell for a fortune, thanks to Manhattan real estate prices. He got them a couple of adjoining suites in the same hotel that held the Hellion Club and started looking for real estate.

Alex, surprisingly, refused to participate in the hunt for a new house. He wouldn’t talk about it. He wouldn’t write about it. He just smiled sadly and looked away. Sol tried to engage him, but finally realized Alex wasn’t ready.

It annoyed him, if he was being honest. He was going out of his way to treat Alex like an equal, and Alex just kept withdrawing. He wanted to be a good husband, but he couldn’t do all the work.

He finally reached out to Buddy, heading up to the bar on the Saturday after he brought Alex to the hotel from the hospital. “I’m trying here, Buddy,” he explained. “I really am, but I need something from him. I don’t want to unilaterally make a decision that’s going to have him worse off than he already is.”

Buddy sighed and fixed them both martinis. That seemed to be a thing with him. Sol didn’t understand it. He just accepted it. “I’ve been messaging back and forth with Alex.”

Sol tried not to feel jealous. “Of course you have. You’re his best friend. You’re basically his dad. He deserves to have someone in his life he can talk to like that, even if it’s not me.”

“Very good. Keep saying it and you’ll believe it.” Buddy winked. “It’s hard, I know. I shouldn’t tease you. But basically the whole thing with Alex right now is exactly what the social worker told both of you to expect. He’s having trouble coping with everything that’s happened. And of course he can’t speak, so he can’t even express it.”

“He can write it.” Sol scowled into his cocktail glass.

“He could. He’d feel like a dumbass, but he could write all that down. I mean, can you see yourself sitting there writing ‘I’m sad about this thing’ on a piece of paper? Well neither can he.” Buddy arched his eyebrow at Sol, and Sol felt like he was about two feet tall.

“Anyway,” Buddy continued, looking back at his glass. “It’s like this. He’s got all these hormones, and he’s got all this grief and trauma and all that. And sometimes he feels like you two can get through it, and of course you love him and it’s all going to be okay if he can just get through the next ten minutes, twenty four hours, and so on.”

“And sometimes he thinks you only proposed because of the baby, even though you said you didn’t. And now that there’s no baby it’s just a matter of time before he winds up in that apartment a block away or so. Which is why he still hasn’t given up the lease.”

Sol wondered if a person’s brain could literally short out. That was how it felt right now. “I can’t fix that.”

“Of course you can’t.” Buddy slumped. “No one can. It’s not rational. It’s something he just has to work through. It’s a brain thing, not a logic thing.”

Sol pressed his lips together. There had to be something he could do, some way he could help.

“I’m selling the penthouse,” he said after a moment. “Do you have a laptop?”

“This isn’t the side of Everest here.” Buddy scowled at him, but shuffled off to find his laptop.

Sol logged into the site he was using to search for real estate and changed his search parameters just a bit. He found what he was looking for in thirty seconds.

“Here. It’s got something like nine bedrooms, so we can have as many kids as we want. We can hire people to do the landscaping, and the rest of the house is huge too. And it’s in the Bronx. Near a park. It’s not even too far from here.” Sol looked up at Buddy, who gaped at the screen.

“How the hell has this place not been cut up for crappy apartments yet?” Buddy put his drink down and scowled at the mansion on the screen. “And who honestly needs thirteen bathrooms? The Pope doesn’t have thirteen bathrooms.”

“I make more money than he does, Buddy. Do you think this would be a good way to show my commitment to him? It’s everything I need, everything he might need, and it’s in the Bronx. Carsten will love it, and it looks like it’s got an open house right now.”

Buddy slugged down his martini. “Let’s go.”

Sol drank his at a more measured pace than Buddy, but he drank it quickly. He didn’t want to miss out on the dream house, after all.

When they got to the house, it turned out to be a dream house indeed. The wiring had been updated, the plumbing was brand new, and the only hint of violence that the house had ever seen was two cats having a territorial dispute on the wall surrounding the property.

Sol fell in love with it, despite its presence in the Bronx. Buddy fell in love with it on Alex’s behalf. “It’s too big and too fancy by half,” he groused, “but Alex deserves a big, fancy, and beautiful place. He deserves everything.”

“Hell yeah, he does.” Sol offered the owners cash then and there. They accepted. He got the keys a few days later, and Sol brought them over to the hotel.

Alex stared at the keys, dumbfounded. He stared at the address on the flyer Sol had printed out. “You told me you wanted to live and die in the Bronx, Alex.” Sol grinned, like it was a joke. “While I’m not excited for you to speed that process up, we do need a place to live. Together, forever, just like we promised. We’re still getting married. We’re still going to love each other until the end of time. Stuart doesn’t get to take that from us. Understand?”

Alex threw his arms around Sol and held him tight. “I understand,” he whispered into Sol’s ear.