Claire kept her word.
She sat upright against the headboard for the first several hours, a single low lamp burning on the side table, her attention split between the book she'd brought to occupy her hands and the steady, periodic checks she made of Aaron's back — a light press of fingers against his shoulder blade every twenty minutes or so, gauging temperature, gauging tension, gauging whether the quiet hum he'd described had shifted into anything more urgent.
It hadn't. Not for hours.
Eva fell asleep first, her usual boundless energy finally catching up with her somewhere around midnight, her arm draped loosely over Aaron's middle even in sleep, as if some part of her intended to keep monitoring him regardless of consciousness. Alyssa followed not long after, curled at the foot of the bed in a position that would have looked impossibly small a few days ago and now simply looked comfortable, her breathing slow and even.
