Chapter 194 Writing to him

Chapter 194 Writing to him
MICHAEL'S POV
Ryan got stabilized enough to come home.
The nutritional support continued for a while, which meant our apartment briefly acquired more medical equipment than we were accustomed to, but eventually he started managing tiny amounts of food again. Eating was still difficult. Sometimes it took him twenty minutes to finish something that would've taken him three. Sometimes he took one bite and pushed the plate away. Sometimes he surprised both of us and ate more than we'd expected.
And, somehow, there were good days. Bright ones. Days when the world seemed briefly willing to give us something back. Days when we laughed until Ryan had to press a hand to his stomach and tell me to stop making him laugh. Days when we forgot to check the clock, forgot about blood counts and medications and appointments.
Like the evening Ryan decided Ember needed a professional photoshoot. He'd cleared a section of the living room, draped a pale blanket over the back of a chair and positioned one of our lamps at an angle that apparently mattered enormously.
Ember, naturally, had no interest in cooperating.
"Come on," Ryan murmured, crouched in front of her with his camera. "You're ruining my artistic vision."
Ember blinked.
"She's difficult," he told me.
And I watched from the couch, trying not to laugh as he spent the next twenty minutes repositioning her by approximately three inches at a time. Every time she moved, he sighed like a disappointed photographer working with an exceptionally unprofessional model.
Eventually he got the shot he wanted. He looked at the camera screen, then at Ember.
"Perfect."
I smiled and lifted my phone, recording him instead. Those were the days I wanted to keep. The stupidly ordinary ones. The ones that didn't feel important until you realized how much you would give to have one back.
The next afternoon, we wandered into a store because we'd run out of something completely unrelated to camping. But we somehow ended up in the camping aisle. Ryan picked up a tent, I picked up a portable stove. He found a lantern, I found sleeping bags. Neither of us knew where exactly we were going. By the time we left, we'd bought enough equipment to convincingly pretend we knew how to camp.
We spent the drive home looking up campsites nearby. A few hours later, we were driving toward one beside a lake, our car packed with supplies and both of us operating under the dangerously optimistic assumption that assembling a tent couldn't possibly be that complicated.
It was.
It was, in fact, incredibly complicated.
We were twenty minutes into our struggle when a couple from the next campsite wandered over and asked if we needed help.
Ryan looked at our tent, then at me...then back at her.
"Desperately."
Her name was Keisha. Her partner was Drew, and they'd been driving across the country one state at a time for nearly six months, sleeping in campsites whenever they could and collecting postcards from every place they stopped. They'd apparently started the trip after Keisha quit her job and Drew realized he had accumulated an unreasonable amount of vacation time.
"We're trying to see all fifty states before we get bored of each other," Drew explained.
With their help, our tent eventually became something resembling a tent rather than a collection of poles. That evening, the four of us sat around the fire.
And Ryan talked.
Really talked.
He was good at it, too. Funny without trying too hard. Curious. Interested in the places they'd been, the worst motel they'd stayed in, the strangest roadside attraction they'd seen. He asked questions and remembered little details and somehow made two strangers feel like people he'd known longer than an hour. I mostly watched him.
It struck me that there were going to be so many people in the world who would never know Ryan Ashbrook. People who would never hear his laugh. Never see the way his face changed when he talked about something he loved. Never know that he could make a complete stranger feel interesting.
It felt almost cruel. Eventually, the subject of his cancer came up. It wasn't dramatic. It didn't become that awful, careful silence I'd grown used to. Drew asked, because the cancer had become pretty visible, and Ryan answered. Keisha wished him a full recovery.
"We'll be thinking about you," she said. And that was it.
Later, inside the tent, Ryan and I kept talking long after the fire had gone out. He was halfway through telling me something when his voice gradually disappeared.
I looked over and he was asleep. I stayed there for a while, watching him breathe. Then I opened my phone and wrote a chapter in my notes app.
The gardener's heart kept cracking, but maybe that was okay. He'd finally shown his childhood crush around the garden. They'd repaired the old swing at the edge of it, the same swing where his heart had first stumbled over itself for that boy years ago.
If a few pieces chipped away now, maybe it wasn't tragedy. Maybe some things were worth breaking for. I checked Ryan's temperature before pulling the sleeping bag higher around him.
For a while, I just sat there. The tent was small enough that there wasn't really anywhere for my eyes to go. The half-zipped entrance. Our shoes pushed against one corner. The lantern we'd forgotten to turn off completely throwing a weak circle of light across the fabric.
Then I saw the notebook Ryan had bought me on Bainbridge. I'd already filled a good portion of it with ideas for the book...sentences I'd thought of at inconvenient hours, bits of dialogue, scenes I'd been afraid I'd forget. Some pages were crossed out so aggressively that the paper had nearly torn.
I reached for it. My thumb stopped against the pages I'd ripped out while we were on the island. They were buried somewhere beneath the trees now, sealed inside that glass jar we'd turned into a time capsule. I remembered sitting there with Ryan, writing to him.
Not about him.
To him.
I'd written things I'd never been able to say out loud, then folded the pages carefully and tucked them into the jar. It had hurt in a way I hadn't expected. There was something brutal about putting words down when you knew the person you were writing to might never read them.
But it had been freeing too. Like I'd taken everything I'd been carrying around inside my chest and, for a few minutes, convinced myself it belonged somewhere else. I thought about what Ryan had told me on that same island.
“Don't turn into Angel Jimenez.”
I smiled faintly. I wasn't planning to. This wasn't that. I wasn't trying to turn Ryan into a story. I wasn't trying to make meaning out of something that didn't have any. I just needed somewhere to put the weight of it all.
So I picked up the pen and looked at Ryan for a long moment. He was still asleep, his face softened by it, his breathing quiet beneath the sleeping bag. Then I turned to a clean page. At the top, I wrote his name.
I stared at it for a second. Then I started writing. And somehow, after that, everything else came easily.