"And he's already had a panic attack. And he tried to—" Her throat closed tight around the rest of the sentence, the image of Mu Yunchen walking into the sea flashing behind her eyes again—the black water rising around his waist, his face blank with grief, his hands reaching for something only he could see.
She swallowed hard, forcing the words past the obstruction. "Please. I need to see him. I need him to know I'm alive. Before anything else happens. Before he—"
She couldn't finish that sentence.
Didn't want to finish it.
The words hung there between them, heavy with everything unsaid: the fear that grief could finish what the explosion had started, that a heart already cracked by loss could simply stop if it believed the worst for one more minute. The fear that had driven her to swim when her lungs burned, to walk when her feet shredded, to survive when the sea had tried so hard to claim her.
