Chapter 2: The Name on the Glass

Chapter 2: The Name on the Glass

The world dissolved into a roaring silence. Jackson Ryder stood frozen in the hospital corridor, the boisterous laughter of his friends fading into a distant, irrelevant hum. His heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs, a wild counterpoint to the orderly, sterile environment around him.

A ghost. He’d just seen a ghost.

Elara.

“Jax? You coming?” Mike, his hulking left tackle, clapped a hand on his shoulder, the impact barely registering. “Mark’s room is this way. Dude’s probably milking this broken hand for all the pretty nurses he can get.”

Jax couldn’t tear his eyes from the NICU window. But she was gone. The chair she’d been sitting in was empty, a phantom impression of her sorrow left in her wake. Had he imagined it? A waking dream born from a year of unresolved anger and a longing he refused to name? No. The weariness in her eyes, the protective curve of her spine—that was real. He’d have recognized her in a hurricane.

“Go on without me,” Jax managed, his voice rough. He shrugged off Mike’s hand. “I’ll… I’ll catch up.”

“Everything good, man?” Mike’s brow furrowed. He wasn’t the most perceptive guy, but even he could sense the sudden shift in the atmosphere.

“Yeah. Fine. Just saw someone I thought I knew,” Jax lied, his gaze still fixed on the empty chair. Someone I thought I knew. The phrase tasted like ash. He knew Elara Vance better than he knew his own playbook. Or he used to.

He watched his friends amble down the hall, their easy camaraderie a stark contrast to the knot of cold dread tightening in his gut. They were here because Mark, their idiot tight end, had tried to punch a wall after a bar fight and lost. A stupid, trivial injury in a world of casual violence and easy fixes. But the place Elara had been staring into… that wasn’t trivial. That was a room heavy with a silence that felt more profound than any roar from a stadium crowd.

He had to find her.

The need was a physical ache, a primal command that overrode everything else. He turned, his letterman jacket suddenly feeling too loud, too bright for these hushed corridors. He walked, aimless at first, peering into waiting rooms and past half-open doors. The hospital was a maze of pale greens and muted beiges, every corner turning into another identical hallway.

His mind raced, a frantic search for an explanation. Was she sick? The thought sent a jolt of pure, undiluted fear through him. He’d spent the last year being angry at her. He’d replayed their last conversation a thousand times, her words about holding him back, about his world being too much for her. It was a clean, brutal cut, and it had made no sense. He’d tried to fix it the only way he knew how—with promises, with the offer of his family’s influence, with the kind of grand gestures he thought could solve anything. She had refused it all, vanishing from his life so completely it was like she’d never been there at all.

But seeing her now, so fragile and exhausted… the anger evaporated, replaced by a fierce, forgotten protectiveness.

His feet, seemingly with a will of their own, led him back. Back through the pediatric wing, past a mural of smiling cartoon animals, to the imposing double doors of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He stopped, a breath catching in his throat. This felt like trespassing on sacred ground.

He peered through the window again, his hands braced against the cool glass.

And there she was.

She was standing now, back at the same spot, next to the same small, glowing box. She hadn’t left. She’d just moved, her slender back to the door. Her hand was pressed against the top of the incubator, her head bowed as if in prayer. She was a lone sentinel, a guardian angel whose wings were heavy with exhaustion, her entire universe contained in that single, fragile life.

He couldn't stand outside a second longer. The questions were a fire in his blood.

Taking a deep breath, he pushed open the heavy door. The sterile air hit him, thick and warm. The chorus of beeps and soft whirring machines grew louder, a symphony of fragile life. A nurse glanced at him, her expression questioning, but Jax’s focus was singular.

Elara.

She didn't turn. She seemed completely unaware of his presence, lost in her vigil. He took a silent step, then another, his sneakers making no sound on the polished floor. He was close now, close enough to see the faint tremor in the hand she had resting on the incubator. Close enough to see the name card.

A small, white, laminated card was taped to the glass. His eyes, trained to read defenses in a split second, scanned the clinical, printed text, searching for a name, a clue, any piece of information that would make the world snap back into focus.

PATIENT I.D.: Baby Boy Vance-Ryder

The air left his lungs in a single, silent gasp.

Vance-Ryder.

Her name.

His name.

The two words, separated by a hyphen, fused together and slammed into his consciousness with the force of a bone-shattering, blindside tackle. The floor seemed to drop out from under him. The rhythmic beeping of the machines faded into a deafening roar in his ears.

Vance. Ryder.

It wasn’t possible. It was a typo. A mistake. A hallucination.

But it explained everything. The sudden breakup a year ago. Her disappearing from their world. The iron-clad stubbornness in her refusal to let him "fix" things. And the profound, soul-deep exhaustion etched into every line of her body.

His gaze snapped from the impossible name on the card to the impossibly small baby inside the glass box. A tiny chest, a mess of wires, a little knit cap on a head no bigger than a tennis ball. Then, his eyes lifted to her.

As if sensing the seismic shift in the room, Elara slowly turned. The fear that had been simmering in her hazel eyes erupted into full-blown panic as she saw him standing there, his face a mask of shattered disbelief.

The silence between them stretched, thick and suffocating, weighted down by a year of lies and one life-altering secret. He saw her lips part, a soundless plea for him to leave, to un-see what he had seen.

But it was too late. He had seen. And the first word of their terrifying new reality was already clawing its way up his throat.

“Ellie?” he whispered, the name a ragged, broken thing in the sacred quiet of the room.