Page 118 of Reckless Obsession

My heart stumbles.

I stare at her, suddenly too awake despite the exhaustion dragging at every part of me.

“He’s been here the whole time,” she continues. “He was there before the ambulance arrived and was the one trying to keep you calm.”

A strange, sharp feeling twists through my chest.

“He… was?”

My mother nods.

“He didn’t leave your side.” Her hand settles against my cheek, warm and steady. “I saw his face, Maksim. He was trying to act composed but I could see how much it worried and terrified him.”

I don’t know what to do with that.

Tristan terrified.

The idea doesn’t fit cleanly in my mind. Tristan is always composed and Infuriatingly impossible to read unless he wants to be read.

But terrified?

My heart gives another hard, humiliating skip.

“He kept asking you to breathe,” she adds quietly. “He kept telling you to stay with him. He looked…” She pauses, her expression softening with a sad, knowing look. “He looked like he was trying not to fall apart.”

For one reckless second, hope rises in me.

Small and vicious and stupid.

Then embarrassment crushes it flat.

Because he saw me like that.

On the floor. Unable to breathe. Panicking over spiders like I wasn’t a grown man with a functioning brain and a lifetime of practice keeping myself under control. He saw the worst, most pathetic version of me. The ten-year-old boy I have spent years pretending no longer exists.

My stomach knots.

“I don’t want to see him.”

Her fingers still against my cheek.

“Maksim—”

“I mean it.” I turn my face toward the pillow, avoiding her eyes. “I can’t. Not right now.”

There’s a pause.

“I just want to go home.” I say finally.

I wait for her to argue. To tell me I’m being unreasonable or dramatic or emotionally constipated, which would be accurate but unhelpful.

The hospital room door opens before I can spiral further and my father walks in.

And somehow the whole room changes around him.

My father never needs volume to alter a space. He does it with presence alone, with that particular stillness he carries, the kind that feels expensive and deliberate and impossible to replicate. He is composed and dressed perfectly as always, but I know him too well. I see the concern in the slight tension around his blue eyes. His gaze lands on me first, sharp and assessing, as if he’s taking inventory of every pale inch of my face and every monitor attached to me.

Then his gaze shifts to my mother and softens. It always does.