"Hey, what's wrong?"

"Just thinking," Stephanie says, glancing at Paul sleeping in the bed in front of her. She turns to Chris, "was the car really that bad?"

Chris nods his head, "Yeah, it was completely totaled. I have to wonder how fast the other guy was going because he crushed the car. Paul is so lucky."

"Yeah," Stephanie turns back to Paul, staring at him with an intense look on her face. Chris reaches over and grabs her hand, drawing her attention back to him. She smiles sadly at him, and he hates to say it, but it worries him a little bit. He squeezes her hand, hoping she will open up to him, but she doesn't appear to want to talk, so he knows he has to prompt her.

"What's on your mind?"

"Nothing, free and clear," she jokes weakly. Her heart wasn't in it though.

"You're thinking about Paul," he wagers a guess as to what it was considering they are both sitting in a darkened hospital room. Stephanie didn't feel right leaving Paul for the night, and Chris didn't want her to be by herself, so he'd stayed too. He hoped that she would want to go back to the hotel until the morning so she could get some real sleep in a bed, but he knows how headstrong and stubborn Stephanie can be.

"Well, yeah," she laughs, "hard not to, don't you think?"

"But it's more?" Chris takes a guess. "Are you…um, is that, like, is this a situation where you realize how much you do love someone and shouldn't have left them?"

There, he put it out there. He didn't want to put it out there, but if that's what she was thinking, he thought he had a right to know that she was thinking it. If that was her thought process, well, he'd certainly feel like the world's biggest idiot right now. Had he really just suggested that his fiancée might want to go back to her ex-husband.

"And if that were the case?" she asks. "If I were to say that was it, that I was having second thoughts, that this accident gave me a new perspective on everything to do with him, what would you say to that?"

"I would tell you that it's okay," he tells her honestly. "I would just want you to be happy with whoever you were with, and that's that. I mean, I could tell you that I would get down on my knees and beg, but we both know I wouldn't."

"It's not that," she reassures him. "It's nothing like that at all. I still know who is best for me, and it's not him," she nods towards Paul. "I was just thinking about how close I was to being in that car. If it's as bad as you say, and if it's as bad as Shane told me then there's a good chance I wouldn't be here right now if I was in that car."

"But you weren't," he says, and the relief in his voice is palpable. He'd thought about that too. When you're sitting in a darkened hospital room, you tend to let your mind wander, and there were a few times he'd let it wander straight into thinking about Stephanie being in that car. The thought terrifies him, and it made him want to wrap her up in bubble wrap forever.

"But I could have been. It was so…I could have been. I was looking for him for a ride. When you didn't leave the keys, I was going to look for him. I thought, 'oh, Paul's probably still here, I'll just grab a ride with him,' and look where I could have ended up."

"But you didn't," he reiterates. "You missed him, you went with Christian, and you're fine."

"I could have died," her voice is barely a whisper, more just a breath. He thought about that too, thought so hard it threatened to make him break, but he just scooted his chair closer, unaware of how much noise that really made and took her into his arms.

"But you weren't," he says it again, emphatically this time, kissing the crown of her head. "I wouldn't let you, I would never let you die. Do you understand me?"

In the future, there's a weird sense of expectation and calmness. Even as he lays there, his entire being trembling, there's this weird sense of silence that just envelopes him. He doesn't know why, but it all just makes so much sense right now. He's not even sure what makes sense, but it does now. He would never let her die. He said the words, he meant them, and he would never let her leave him, he just wouldn't, not now, not ever.

"Hey, what's wrong?"

He doesn't realize his eyes have been closed this entire time, that the darkness he thinks is darkness is really just the back of his eyelids. Then he senses light, turned on so she can get a better look. He doesn't want to open them in case this is a dream, but he said the words, he said he would never let her die. He would never let her…

He opens them slowly, and the first thing he sees is her smile, brighter than ever, but with a twinge of concern. Then his eyes travel up to her blue-gray eyes, the same eyes he's gazed into forever, and in that moment, every rush of memory and emotion flood him in one moment of utter clarity, and he stares at her like he's never seen her before, but he has, he's seen her for years, years that he didn't know he would ever have, and years that fill him to the brim with Stephanie instead of the emptiness of her loss.

"Chris?" more concern edges in her voice.

"Hey," he finally says, the first words he's said to her in years. He knows now that's not true, but he also knows the reality he just erased. He knows and still feels, in a distant part of his body, the effects of losing her. It's still all there, not replaced, but pushed out of the way. "Hey," he says again because he just wants to say words at her, and he doesn't care what words.

"What's wrong? Bad dream?" she wonders.

"Horrible," he tells her because it was. It's all a dream now, a never was, but it was horrible, all of it, all the time he'd lived without her there. He wonders if the other people in her life feel the shift, if during all this they too felt that something was amiss, that something was changing and growing, and he wonders if they'll be knocking down the door to get to her.

"What about?"

"Just…a mix of things, hard to grasp now," he lets her know, even though they aren't hard to grasp. He doesn't want to tell her she died, that she died years ago in a car crash because she was still married to Paul, and he didn't know his true feelings until she was dead. He doesn't want to tell her the years of living without her, the way her family was devastated, how he realized much too late how much he loved her.

"Good, that means it wasn't a bad one," she tells him kindly, her head burying itself into her pillow. "Go back to sleep now," she tells him sleepily. He doesn't want to sleep ever again. He wants to make sure this isn't a dream. He wants to make sure that she's real and he won't lose her again. He can't bear losing her again. "Sleep is precious now," she mumbles more to herself than to him, and he doesn't take the time to process it.

"Can I hug you?" he asks like a scared little boy.

"Do you need a bedtime story too?" she giggles.

"If you don't mind one," he teases, he teases. He gets to tease her, and she laughs at him, her nose crinkling in that way it does. He wants to reach out and touch that little crinkle, touch her cheek, touch every part of her. Oh wait, every part of her? He has the memories of her and him together, of course, but he doesn't know her in that way. It's strange to have the memory of it but to not have it directly.

"Well, I am pretty tired, so I think I can manage the hug at least," she sits up, stretching her arms above her head, feeling a little click in her neck and sighing. Then she leans over and she hugs him, and he lets the contact be one-sided for a moment before he pulls her tightly against him, burying his face into her neck. "Too tight, Christopher."

"Sorry," he pulls away, his face inches from hers. "You're so beautiful."

"A guy will say anything to get into his wife's pants," she tells him. His wife, he almost forgets, she's his wife. They've been married for two years now, yes, married for two years, that's right.

"Wife," he breathes.

"Husband," she jokes. She leans in and kisses him. "Mmm, you taste like sleep and morning breath. Can we go back to sleep now?"

"You sleep, I just, I think I just need a minute," he tells her, "but go ahead, lie down, please, I insist that you lie down and sleep."

"You're weird," she says, but she doesn't protest. She lies down, snuggling deeper into the covers, pulling them over her and gazing up at him, like she expects him to do the same. He does, well, he lies down at least, but he doesn't close his eyes like she does. He lays there, staring at her, staring at this wondrous woman in front of him.

"You were gone," he says quietly.

She opens one eye, "Gone how? When? Earlier?"

"No, in the dream," he confesses, "you were gone, and you were…you were just gone, and I never got to tell you how I felt about you or anything. You left before I could say anything, and it left me…I never got over it."

She furrows her brow a little bit before her face softens, "It was just a dream, I'm right here, you were dreaming. Dreams can be weird sometimes, but…it was probably nothing, okay?"

"Yeah, it was probably nothing." It wasn't nothing, but then, it is at the same time. That timeline, it changed, it never existed. The timeline was this now, his reality had her here. He was with her now, and the other part of him never really existed except in his mind. He opens his mouth to say something to her, something more to reassure her that he's fine, but she's already asleep.

So he lays there and he looks at her, reposed in slumber, and he thanks whoever sent her to him. He doesn't really know how it happened, but he won't question it. He turns over, just for a moment, and grabs his phone. He taps through it and finds himself again. He just has to say it. It's risky and maybe a little bit dumb, but he has to say it to himself.

Chris startles from sleeping on Stephanie's shoulder, the light in the hospital room making it seem warmer than it is. He glances over at her, but she's still sleeping, her body slumped over in her chair. He grabs his phone, wondering if it's Shane asking for an update, but there's only a text message from that same, stupid number that has bothered him for a while now.

Thank you

He groans, For what?

He wishes this person would stop. He wishes they would tell him who they are and what they want. If they're involved with Paul, just say it instead of hiding behind a phone. If it's someone that has designs on Stephanie then he definitely wants to know who it is so he can kick their ass. Overall, he just wants to know what's going on, and he's starting to think he never will know.

Everything