Chapter 493: Bring Him Home

The forty-eight hours the doctor had asked for came and went sometime around dawn on the third day, and nothing in the room changed when they did. A nurse swapped the water pitcher no one was drinking from. The monitor kept its rhythm, the one sound in the room that hadn’t offered anything different since the night they’d wheeled him in.

The doctor came in a little after seven, chart in hand, and didn’t sit down before he spoke, which told Arianne most of it before the words caught up.

"Miss Summers, I want to be honest about where we are." He set the chart on the rail at the foot of the bed. "The swelling from the fall has gone down since the last scan. That’s good on its own. What it doesn’t explain is why he hasn’t surfaced. We’re past the window where I’d tell you to expect him back on his own within days."

"So what do you call it now?"

"A coma." He let the word sit there instead of softening it. "His body is doing what a body does when it’s guarding against damage we can’t fully see yet. I can’t give you a number for how long that guard stays up."

"Can he hear me? Does he know if I’m in the room?"

"There’s no way to confirm that either way. Some families choose to believe he can. I’ve never had cause to tell them they’re wrong." He glanced at the monitor, then back at her. "Talk to him if it helps you. It won’t hurt him."

Arianne nodded, because there wasn’t anything else to do with that answer. Franz’s face had gone through its own changes over the three days — the bruise along his cheekbone had dulled from purple to a sickly yellow-green, healing on a schedule his mind hadn’t agreed to keep pace with. She’d learned every inch of that face doing nothing but watching it not change.

"I want to move him home."

The doctor’s eyebrows came up, the first real reaction she’d gotten out of him since the introductions. "He’s stable enough for transport if we arrange the right team. I wouldn’t recommend a commercial flight. An air ambulance, a full monitoring setup, a physician on board the whole way."

"Arrange it. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes."

"I’ll have the paperwork ready within the hour."

Gilbert was already on the phone in the hallway before she’d finished the sentence, and he lowered it long enough to catch her eye through the doorway. "Lucas has a private hospital on standby in Montclair. Rochefort Group’s own facility. A full team waiting the second we land."

"Good."

"He’s also had Petra’s report couriered to legal this morning, along with everything from the access logs." Gilbert kept his voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry past the two of them. "It’s moving. Slower than either of us wants, but it’s moving."

"I don’t have room to think about that today."

"I know. That’s why I’m carrying it instead of you." He went back to the phone before she had to answer that, and Arianne turned back to the bed, to the hand she’d learned the exact weight and temperature of over three days of holding it, and didn’t let go again until the transport team came to take him.

The flight home ran longer than the flight out had, or maybe it only felt that way with him laid out behind a curtain of monitoring equipment instead of beside her in a window seat. Arianne didn’t sleep. She watched the numbers on the portable monitor instead, memorizing what steady looked like so she’d know the second it wasn’t.

The tarmac had been cleared of everyone but ground crew and a single unmarked car, no manifest filed under Franz’s real name or the one the studios knew him by, the same protocol Gio had built for every arrival that couldn’t survive a camera. Gio was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when they landed, no tablet, no phone in his hand for once, standing exactly where the car would need him to be and nowhere he might be needed for anything else.

"You asked me to tell you how I was once I knew," she said, before he could say anything first. "I still don’t know."

"Then we’ll find out together." Gio fell into step beside her as the medical team wheeled Franz toward the waiting car, and for once he didn’t have a schedule item to fill the silence with. "The hospital’s ready. Aunt Estella has the twins at the house. She wanted to bring them straight here, and I told her to wait until you’d landed."

"Bring them now. They deserve to hear it from me before they see him."

Vincent and Amanda were already waiting outside the private wing’s elevator when the doors opened, Amanda closing the distance before Arianne had fully cleared the threshold, both hands framing Arianne’s face like she needed to confirm for herself that at least one of them had come home standing upright. Vincent hung back half a step, but the hand he set on Arianne’s shoulder gripped harder than the gesture required.

"How is he?" Amanda asked, before anyone had made it past the doorway.

"Stable enough to fly. Not awake." Arianne held onto Amanda’s hands rather than let them drop. "They’re calling it a coma."

Vincent’s jaw worked once before he spoke. "Whatever this hospital needs, it has. I’ve already told the board I’m unreachable for the week."

"You didn’t have to tell them anything. It’s your name on the wing."

"It’s my son in it." Vincent said it plainly, the closest he came to raising his voice all afternoon. "The name doesn’t matter this week."

The Rochefort Group’s private wing took up the whole top floor of a building Arianne had walked past a hundred times without ever needing what it held, and the staff moved Franz into a room with a view of nothing but sky, curtains already drawn against the afternoon sun. Vincent stood at the window with his back to the room for a long moment before he trusted his own face enough to turn around. Arianne was still holding the same hand she’d held since the airfield when Aunt Estella arrived with Lexx on her hip and the twins a step behind her, both of them stopped cold in the doorway at the sight of the bed.

"Uncle Franz." Lily’s voice came out small, nothing like the voice that had negotiated a drawing into his jacket pocket three months ago. "Why is he still asleep?"

"He’s not asleep the way you and I sleep." Arianne crouched to meet her eyes, choosing every word before she let it out. "His body is hurt in a way that’s keeping him from waking up right now. The doctors are watching him every hour to help him get better."

"That’s what a coma is." Leo said the word like he’d already looked it up somewhere, or heard it from someone in the hallway who hadn’t been careful enough about who was listening. His hands had curled into fists at his sides. "People don’t always wake up from those."

"Some people do." Arianne kept her hands steady on Lily’s shoulders even as the shake she’d been holding down all day threatened to climb back up her own arms. "I’m not going to lie to either of you. I don’t know when he’ll wake up. But I know he’s fighting to, and I know he has every reason in the world to come back to you."

Lily’s face crumpled first, and then she was crying in earnest, a full ugly sound that filled the room faster than Arianne could catch her, and Leo lasted three more seconds before he broke too, both of them clinging to her at once, small fists gripping fabric like letting go might make it true.

"He can’t leave us like Mommy and Daddy did," Lily said into Arianne’s shoulder, the words barely holding together. "He can’t. He promised every day."

"I know what he promised you." Arianne held them both as tight as her arms would allow, her own breath shaking loose from wherever she’d been keeping it locked down all day. "I’m asking you to trust me the same way I’m asking myself to trust the doctors. We fight for him. Every single day, we fight for him, together."

Leo pulled back enough to look at Franz’s face, the bruise, the bandage still wrapped above one ear, and his jaw set into a hard, stubborn line, the crying stopped for the moment as something steadier took its place. "Can I talk to him? Even if he can’t hear it?"

"You can. The doctor thinks he might hear it, somewhere underneath."

Leo climbed onto the edge of the bed, careful not to jostle any of the wires taped along Franz’s arm, and put his hand over Franz’s, and told him about the whale trip Kyle still hadn’t stopped talking about, and the project he’d finished without help, and how Lexx had learned to clap for himself when he did something he was proud of. Lily added the parts Leo left out, correcting the order of things until it matched exactly how she remembered it, insisting the project had been Leo’s idea first even though Leo hadn’t claimed otherwise. Lexx reached for Franz’s hair from Aunt Estella’s arms, patting at it with the flat of his hand until Aunt Estella caught his wrist and redirected it somewhere gentler, murmuring something to him that got a small, confused laugh out of Lily despite everything.

Arianne stayed at the foot of the bed and let the sound of both of them fill the room instead of the monitor, one hand resting against Franz’s ankle through the blanket, close enough to feel it if anything in him so much as twitched. Nobody in the room needed her to say anything else. She’d meant every word of the promise, and the only proof that mattered now was going to come from him, whenever he was ready to give it.