Page 173 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
And I can’t do that to her.
Not like this.
Not with the stitches, not with the soreness, not with the baby, not with the sheer brittle fragility of her body after everything it’s survived.
I stand there with my hands hanging uselessly at my sides, wanting to touch her so badly it feels like a physical ache and being more afraid of my own hands than I have ever been in my life.
Jackson keeps talking, voice rougher now, the fear in it barely concealed. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. I’m right here. Look, you’re here with us. You’re okay.”
Zach’s hand makes one slow pass down her arm, steady, controlled. “Just breathe. Come on, baby. There you go.”
Her breathing catches once, twice, then starts to even out.
The tension slowly leaves her face.
Her body stops straining against the dream.
And then she settles again, not waking, just sinking back into sleep while the rest of us are left standing in the wreck of what she carried there.
Jackson sits back, dragging a hand over his face, and I see the shine in his eyes before he looks away.
“Jesus,” he says under his breath, the words scraped raw. “She was still… she was still asking for us.”
Zach doesn’t answer immediately. He keeps his hand on her for another second before he pulls it back, carefully, like even that small loss of contact matters.
When he does speak, his voice is flat with effort. “I know.”
I don’t say anything at all, because if I open my mouth right now, I don’t know what will come out.
The room has changed.
Not physically.
But whatever illusion of safety had started to form in here is gone now. I can feel it in the way Jackson can’t settle back into his chair properly, in the way Zach’s shoulders have tightened, in the way the air seems to carry the echo of her voice long after she’s gone quiet again.
And I know then, with a kind of clarity that doesn’t feel like a decision so much as an unveiling, that I cannot stop halfway.
There is no partial answer to this. There is no version where I tighten security, stay close, play defense, and wait for the world to leave her alone. There is no safe life for her while the people who fed this thing are still out there, still breathing, still capable of reaching in.
The Vargas family needs to end.
Not be managed. Not be contained. Ended.
Because I can’t stand in this room and listen to my wife beg for help in her sleep, knowing that somewhere out there are people who helped make that a reality, and pretend there is any future in which I leave them standing.
I look at her again.
At the line of her body beneath the blanket. At the hand Jackson still holds. At the soft lamplight over her face.
And then, because the thought arrives whole and undeniable, I finally let myself name what I have been circling all night.
This is who I am now.
Not the man trying to stand with one foot inside this world and one foot outside it. Not the man pretending he could keep the violence compartmentalized, useful, temporary, separate from the rest of his life. Not the man who thought he could choose when to step fully into Bellandi power.
That man is gone.
He ended the second I saw her on that floor.
