Chapter 254 Your Father Needs to Wake Up
ADRIANA
The guard’s voice on the phone was carefully measured, like he was trying not to cause panic while delivering information that was inherently panic-inducing.
“My Queen, we spotted Leo on the balcony. His legs were hanging over the edge. We called out to him several times and he didn’t respond to us.”
I was out of my chair before he finished the sentence.
I didn’t wait for the lift. I took the stairs two at a time, moving through the corridor with my heart doing something irregular in my chest, my mind pulling in directions I didn’t want it to go.
Leo had been withdrawn for days. He’d spent an entire morning lying beside his unconscious father without explanation. He’d shut the door in my face and told me to leave, and I had left because I thought he needed space, and now this?.
I pushed through the bedroom door. “Leo!”
The room was empty, but the balcony doors opened, curtains shifting in the breeze. There was no one there. My knees felt weak but I forced myself to keep moving.
I crossed to the bathroom and raised my hand to knock and the door swung open from inside before I made contact.
Leo stood in front of me in a towel with earphones around his neck and the expression of someone who had been interrupted mid-routine and couldn’t understand why.
“Mum.” He looked behind me, then back at me. “What’s going on? You look—”
I stepped forward and pulled him into a hug that was probably tighter than he expected. He was taller than me so the geometry of it was slightly awkward, but he didn’t pull back. He stood there and let me hold on until I was ready to let go.
When I stepped back I looked at his face. He stared back at me confused. While I mirrored that emotion with another one. Concern.
“The guards called me,” I said. “They said you were on the balcony with your legs over the edge and you weren’t responding when they called you.”
Understanding moved across his face slowly, followed by genuine embarrassment. “I had my earphones in. I was listening to music.” He glanced toward the balcony. “I didn’t hear anything. I was just sitting there.” He looked back at me. “Is that why you sprinted up here?”
“Yes,” I said, my hand cupped both of his cheeks. Like I needed to feel him to know he was fine. “That is exactly why I sprinted up here.” The words left me in a rush.
He ran a hand through his damp hair and went to sit on the edge of his bed. I sat in the chair across from him and gave myself a moment to let the adrenaline subside.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” he said, looking at the floor. “I need you to know that. That’s not — that’s not what’s happening with me.”
“I know,” I said. “But I needed to see you.”
“Yeah.” He was quiet for a moment. “I get that.”
I waited. I’d learned over the years that Leo came to things in his own time and that pressing produced walls, not openness. So I sat in the chair and I waited, and eventually he started talking.
“Dad’s birthday is in six weeks,” he said. “And my shift is coming. And graduation after that.” He kept his eyes on his hands. “He made me a promise about the shift. Like not a general I’ll be there kind of thing, a real conversation where he told me he knew how hard it was the first time and he wanted to be the one there with me. He said he’d been waiting for it.” His voice cracked with emotion.
I felt my heart squeeze for my son. I didn’t interrupt him. As much as I wanted to wrap my arms around him and shield him from the world. I knew he needed to get that out. So I let him.
“And I’ve been telling people at school about him for months. Building him up. Going on about how he’s going to come to graduation, how he’s going to be there for the shift, how they’ll finally get to meet him. And now—” He stopped and pressed his lips together.
“And now he’s not there,” I said quietly.
“He’s lying in a bed and I don’t know if he’s going to wake up.” He said it to his hands rather than to me, and I could hear how much it had cost him to say it out loud. “And I feel like an idiot for talking about him so much to everyone. For getting excited about it. Like I was setting myself up.”
“You’re not an idiot,” I said. “You were proud of your father and you wanted people to know him. That’s not stupidity, Leo. That’s love.”
He looked up briefly, then back down.
“It feels stupid right now.”
“I know it does.” I moved from the chair to sit beside him on the bed. “But the feeling and the reality are two different things.” I paused. “I called in new doctors. You know that. They’ve run their own tests and we’re waiting on the results. Whatever they find, we act on it. Immediately. I am not giving up on your father and he is not giving up on us.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know Elijah,” I said simply. “He has never once failed you when it actually mattered. Not once in fifteen years.” I held his gaze until he met mine. “Whatever is keeping him in that bed, he is fighting it. That is who he is.”
Leo was quiet for a long time. The kind of quiet that meant things were settling rather than building.
“My friends think you’re—” He grimaced and stopped.
“Think I’m what?”
“They said you’re attractive. Like, multiple ones said it. And it’s the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever had to process.”
Despite everything, something in me loosened. “How did you respond?”
“I told them that if Dad ever heard them say that, he’d castrate them.”
“That is genuinely something he would say.”
“I know.” He exhaled. “I’m sorry for how I’ve been this week. I should have just told you what was going on instead of making it weird.”
“Next time tell me.” I put my arm around him briefly. “You don’t have to carry things alone to protect me. That’s not your job.” I stood up. “And Leo please, sit wherever you want. Just maybe not with your legs dangling over the edge. For my heart’s sake.”
“Yeah, okay.” He almost smiled. “Deal.”
I walked out of his room feeling a relief that left me drained rather than energized, because the fear had been real even if the outcome was fine, and bodies didn’t immediately process the difference.
I stood in the corridor outside his door and breathed for a moment, my mind on Elijah.
I had told my son his father would be there when it mattered. I had said it with conviction because it was what Leo needed to hear and because I believed it. But belief was not guarantee, and standing alone in a corridor at the end of another long day, I felt the gap between those two things more acutely than I usually let myself.
Pushing that thought back, I went to check on the twins, who were somehow still awake and arguing about something through the wall between their rooms. I knocked twice and told them lights out, and there was a brief silence followed by shuffling and then quiet. I checked on Lorain, who was asleep already. I looked in on Lana, who was also fast asleep, but I knew she would be up in a few hours, at most.
I stood in the doorway of the nursery for a long moment and looked at my youngest daughter and thought: your father needs to wake up. He is missing too much.
Then I went to bed and lay there in the dark and made a decision that if the doctors came back with nothing useful, I was going to find a specialist who hadn’t been found yet, from wherever I needed to reach, and I was going to keep doing that until someone gave me an answer I could act on.