CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Rachel opened her eyes from a nap she couldn't remember taking and for a strange moment, she felt like a swimmer breaking through a tumultuous sea into the quiet world above. Her eyelids fluttered against the intrusive brightness of the hospital room, her senses reeling back to reality in disjointed fragments. The sterile scent of antiseptic mingled with the subtle undertone of cafeteria food.

She tried to shift, to sit up, but her left arm protested with a sharp twinge, halting her movement. She turned her head, taking in the sight of the thick bandage wrapped around her forearm, the bulky form of a protective cast obscuring the lines of her skin. Memories cascaded back to her—a blade glinting in low light, the resistance of flesh, Alice's scream. Her brain pulled the murky information to the surface: Alice's cut had been deep, an ugly truth carved into her bicep. It had required surgery to repair a tendon. The surgery…she was pretty sure it had taken place before the unremembered nap.

She glanced across the room and saw that Jack was sitting in the visitor's chair, a book held loosely in his hands. His focus, however, was on the sleeping figure of Paige, whose soft breaths lifted and fell in rhythm with his heartbeat, her small body curled trustingly on his lap.

Jack glanced up, sensing movement, and his eyes met Rachel's. The corners of his mouth lifted in a gentle smile that reached his eyes. He nudged Paige gently, stirring her from slumber. Bleary-eyed but swiftly alert, Paige straightened and chimed in with a sleepy yet cheerful "Good morning" in unison with Jack.

"Your surgery went smoothly," Jack said, setting aside the book he had been pretending to read. His voice was calm, measured, designed to soothe. But Rachel could hear the undercurrent of concern that lay beneath—the same worry that had furrowed his brow the night before. "Do you remember any of it?"

She shook her head. "I remember leaving the house in an ambulance. I fell asleep at some point. I remember them telling me a tendon had been damaged and…and I think that's it."

"Yeah. They surgery took about an hour and a half and you've been sleeping for three hours."

She nodded, and her mind raced to catch up with everything else. "What about Carson? The agents on the scene thought he was dead."

"Carson's still in surgery," Jack said, breaking the tentative silence. His voice was steady, but his eyes betrayed a flicker of the fear that had shrouded the room while Rachel slept. "It was touch-and-go for a while there. But he's fighting, Rachel. The doctors think he'll pull through." He paused, looking down at Paige, still nestled against him, oblivious to the gravity of their conversation. "But he'll have months of recovery ahead of him."

"And Natalie King?"

"Safe," Jack assured her, offering a slight smile. "She's shaken, of course, but physically unharmed. They've got someone for her to talk with to help her process... everything."

The room seemed to close in around Rachel, the beeps of nearby monitors punctuating the silence that followed. It wasn't just about solving the case anymore; it was about the aftermath, the healing that needed to happen for everyone involved.

"What about Alice?" She hated that she felt a pang of remorse for how she'd reacted to seeing the woman, temporarily losing control of herself.

"You…well, you knocked a few teeth out and shattered her orbital bone. But she'll live. She'll live in a prison cell somewhere for a very long time."

Rachel looked down at her right hand and saw that it was bruised. She was sure that when whatever pain meds she was currently on wore off, it would ache.

"Rachel..." Jack hesitated, then leaned closer, a seriousness cloaking his expression. "There's something else. Anderson wanted to tell you himself, but I asked to be the one."

Her mind raced, thoughts of being reprimanded for her reckless charge towards Alice surfacing. "What, he's going to fire me now?" she tried to joke, but the humor fell flat, lost in the weight of last night's chaos. The thought wasn't absolutely ridiculous. She had, after all, torn away from him last night and shouted at him to get out of her house.

"Nothing like that," Jack reassured her quickly. "Anderson's just glad you're safe, really. But Theo Barnes..." He trailed off, searching Rachel's eyes before delivering the blow. "He collapsed last night, in pain, as you know. I thought it was a seizure and I suppose it could have been, but it turns out he's been harboring a brain tumor for a long time. Never got it treated. The prognosis isn't good. Maybe two weeks."

Shock coursed through Rachel, her mind struggling to reconcile the information. And just like that, she sympathized with him. A tumor—an intruder to the body, a complete redirect to whatever life he'd planned. And, just maybe, it had been the direct cause of his skewed perception of the murders he'd seen on the stage—murders he apparently viewed as authentic rather than acted out for a play.

"And he's refusing surgery," Jack added quietly.

Rachel turned away, her gaze settling on the window where morning light streamed through, casting long shadows across the floor. Theo's choices, Carson's fight for life, Natalie's unseen wounds – it all converged into a stark reminder of mortality's relentless march. It reminded her of her own headaches—the small one that had kept sneaking around in her skull during the Theo Barnes case.

"Jack," she started, her voice barely above a whisper, "I've been having the headaches again. They're pretty small, but…but they're there." Her admission hung between them, heavy and foreboding. She had kept them to herself, little throbs of pain that she attributed to stress or lack of sleep. She supposed they could call her specialists when they got home to see what it might mean, if those last rounds of experimental treatments in Seattle had ultimately failed.

"Rachel, you—"

"The denial…it was too strong. I couldn't face the prospect of dying, knowing that we were about to get married, to be a family." Tears trailed down her cheeks. Speaking it out loud was somehow just as bad as the possibility itself. "I'm sorry."

Jack only smiled—a kind, reassuring curl of his lips that didn't reach his eyes. He shook his head, dismissing her worry before it could root deeper in her conscience. "We can talk about that later. Not right now, okay?. I just…I think everything is going to work out in the end, you know?"

She nodded, though she knew no such thing.

That peculiar comment lingered between them, suspended in the sterile air of the hospital room. The soft beep of monitors provided a steady backdrop to the puzzle of Jack's surprisingly na?ve hope. Outside, the sky was a pale wash of blue, a new day having dawned and chased away the night and all its terrors.