What's left is William’s contempt for me. My father made sure of that, and the accident finished the job. I have known it since I was sixteen and I have never expected anything different.
I switch hands on the cup. The cardboard is fully soft now.
I turn to make another pass toward the window. "She's always been brave, she's—"
The outer doors open.
I stop pacing.
It isn't just a sound. It's a pressure shift, the air changing before anything else has registered. Three men come through the entrance and the room reorganizes itself around them without asking permission.
William is in the center.
He is bigger than I remember. Taller. More muscle. He walks like he hasn't been stopped at a door in years. His eyes moving before he's all the way through the entrance, taking the room in one practiced sweep.
He has no reason to recognize me. I was sixteen the last time he saw me. It was dark, and those kinds of circumstances don't leave faces intact in memory.
On his left, Adrian Kade. Paula's lawyer, who sat across a conference table from me with a careful professional face. On his right, Carter Hill. The new client from this morning.
All three of them carrying the same tight, controlled worry.
No polite stranger-spacing between them.
These men know each other.
I'm too stunned to process in full what is happening.
William scans the waiting room and immediately crosses to Sergeant Walsh without pausing. "What happened to my sister?" A demand disguised as a question.
Sergeant Walsh doesn't seem fazed. "Sergeant Walsh. Charlotte is one of mine." He extends his hand and William shakes it, not taking his eyes off him. "Charlie and Officer Alvarez responded to a domestic violence complaint in Silver Lake around ten p.m. The situation escalated. The subject had a firearm."
He keeps his voice measured, the specific delivery of a man who has learned how much information to give at once. "Charlie took a round to the shoulder. She went into surgery about an hour ago."
William stands very still absorbing the information.
Then he pushes one hand back through his hair. One single unguarded motion. In it I can see the shape of how afraid he's been for the last however many minutes it took him to get here.
He drops his hand.
His eyes sweep the room again.
Walsh. The chairs. Alvarez. Me. The windows.
He doesn't stop on me. I'm part of the room. Half a second passes.
He looks back.
His expression stays flat. His eyes narrow a fraction, look away, and then back. The second look holds.
The question in his face shifts from neutral to realization. His head tilts. One degree, maybe less. The nervousness he was carrying, the barely-visible tightness of a man who didn’t know what to expect when arriving at the hospital, disappears.
What replaces it is cold.
He takes one step toward me.
"Sienna." Hardly disguised contempt escaping.
My throat closes. I dry-swallow around it. I pull a breath in and let it settle on my shoulders before I open my mouth.
