Outside the room, Destiny was gone.
Inside it, Georgia stayed.
And for the first time since the bullet hit me, dying seemed simpler than living.
CHAPTER 11
DESTINY
He didn’t lifthis hand.
That was what I remembered later.
Not the machines. Not the ICU lights. Not Georgia sitting beside him with her blonde hair loose around her shoulders and his ring shining on her finger like a tiny sun with teeth.
His hand.
I saw him through the glass, awake and pale and still too close to death for any decent universe to ask questions of his heart. Georgia sat beside him, folded over that hand like prayer. Her fingers wrapped around his. Her ring pressed against his bruised knuckles.
He saw me.
I knew he did.
For one suspended second, the whole hallway fell away.
The hospital.
The gunshot wounds.
The years.
The ring.
He looked at me, and every stupid, foolish, bleeding part of me waited.
For what, I didn’t know.
A sign.
A movement.
A breath that said I had not imagined the ICU confession. That I had not poured my heart out to a man who woke up and chose to forget it. That the voice he followed back from death had mattered somewhere deeper than guilt.
His hand twitched.
Maybe.
Or maybe I invented that because my heart had always been willing to make myths out of crumbs when it came to Dylan Degan.
Then Georgia tightened her hold.
And Dylan did not pull away.
He did not lift his hand.
He did not say my name.
He did not do anything except lie there under hospital lights with the woman he had promised to marry holding the hand I had kissed.
