Page 18 of Saint Nick
They stopped in front of the door with her room numberon it. It was his mother’s room. The air felt as though it had thinned out, and every breath he took felt as though it was burning his lungs. He stared at the number on the plaque like it might blink and disappear. Like maybe this was some twisted mix-up, and the past hadn’t come crawling out of the grave to find him.
“Nick,” Sandy said softly. Just his name. But it snapped him out of the fog enough for him to breathe.
“Twenty-five years,” he rasped. His throat felt scraped raw. “I used to picture this a hundred different ways. Thought if this moment ever came—if she was actually alive, I’d know what to say.”
She angled toward him, close enough for her warmth to push back the cold sinking into his spine. “You don’t have to have the right words,” she whispered. “Just the courage to walk through the door.” He let out a sharp exhale. She made it sound simple, but it wasn’t.
Every emotion he’d locked down for two decades roared to the surface all at once—anger, grief, resentment, the ghost of a boy who’d spent Christmas after Christmas staring out a window, waiting for his dead mom to rescue him, but she never came. Beneath it all, something quieter clawed at him. A part of him that still wanted to see her.
He pushed the door open. The room hit him like a gut punch. It was small, dim, and sterile white. Machines ticked and hummed, keeping time with the years he’d lost. And there she was. Margaret Carter—his mother. She was older now, and for some reason, she looked smaller to him. Or maybe he was just bigger. Her hair hung gray and limp around her face and shoulders. Deep lines carved her skin, but her eyes were the same. She wasn’t the ghost that he had expected. And shewasn’t the woman he’d hated in his head. She was just a woman—human, and frail.
His hand slipped out of Sandy’s without meaning to. It felt like stepping off a ledge. “She’s awake,” the nurse said softly.
His lungs felt as though they had stopped working, as Margaret’s eyelids fluttered open. And there they were—those same pale green eyes he’d inherited but spent a lifetime pretending he didn’t.
“Nick,” she whispered.
His name, coming from his mother’s lips, nearly gutted him. Every wall he’d spent two decades building didn’t crumble—it cracked. And somehow, that was worse. He walked toward the bed slowly, like any sudden movement might make the whole scene vanish. His fingers brushed the cold metal railing, anchoring himself to something solid.
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “It’s me.”
Her hand lifted from the sheets—shaking and paper-thin. She was the skeleton of a woman he remembered. He should’ve stepped back. Should’ve protected what was left of his armor. But he didn’t. He let her hand rest on his. It wasn’t forgiveness. Not even close. But it was real.
The sound of the machines was too damn loud. Beep. Beep. Beep. Each one tapped against his skull like a hammer. Nick stood at the side of the bed, fists clenched tight, knuckles aching. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to run or scream.
She was right there and very much alive. After twenty-five years of silence. Twenty-five years of convincing himself she was a ghost. Her fingers were small in his, skin paper-thin, bones like twigs. When he didn’t pull away, something flickered in her eyes—relief, guilt. Maybe both.
“You came,” she whispered, voice rasping like dry leaves.
He barked out a laugh that sounded nothing like a laugh. “Yeah. I came.” His throat burned. “Is that all you wanted from me? You just needed me to obediently show up?”
Her mouth trembled. “Nick?—”
“Don’t say my name like that.” His voice sliced through the quiet, jagged and sharp. “You don’t get to say my name like that.” The nurse shifted by the door, sensing the heat between them, but Sandy caught her eye and gave a slight shake of her head. This wasn’t anyone’s to fix but him and her.
Margaret swallowed. “I never stopped thinking about you.”
“Bullshit,” he shot back, flat and fast. “You let me believe you were dead. I grew up thinking that I was all alone in this world because you had died.”
Her eyes filled, and suddenly she didn’t look like the ghost he’d been fighting all these years. She looked like someone drowning. “I was dead, Nick. At least, that’s what the cops wanted your father to believe. They put me into witness protection and told me that I wasn’t allowed to contact you. They said that if I did, I’d put you in danger.”
He flinched. “So you disappeared.”
“I didn’t want to put you into danger. I thought that leaving you in foster care, to grow up, was the best way to keep you safe,” she admitted.
“Maybe you should’ve let me decide that.” His voice cracked on the last word, loud enough to make the machines stutter. His breath came in hard bursts, a storm he’d carried for years finally breaking land. “I was a kid. And you—” His chest heaved. “You just let me go.”
Tears slid down her temples onto the white sheets. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”
He laughed again, but it was a raw, fractured sound. “You thought wrong.”
Silence thickened around them, the beeping cutting through like a metronome counting out everything they’d lost. Sandy stayed by the door—steady and quiet. And somehow, that made all this easier for him.
Nick pressed a hand to his forehead, dragging in a breath that made his lungs burn. “Do you know what it’s like to spend Christmas after Christmas waiting at the damn window?” His voice was low, wrecked. “I used to count the cars that passed the house I was in. Every time the headlights slowed down, I thought—she’s back. I told myself that they had it all wrong and that you weren’t really dead. I let myself believe that you had come back to take me home with you.”
Her sob was small but violent, torn from somewhere deep inside of her. He stared at her—not the monster he’d built in his head, but a woman with sunken cheeks and shaking hands who’d carved a hole in him so deep nothing had ever filled it—except Sandy.
“Why now?” he asked. “Why, after all this time, are you telling me that you’re alive?”
