Darkness.
Peace.
And then, unbidden, a memory:
“You’re terrified. I can see it in your aura. All these jagged red lines, like lightning. But underneath... underneath there’s blue. Calm blue. You just can’t reach it right now.”
I opened my eyes.
Stared at the ceiling.
She had been right.
Iwasterrified.
Not of her, exactly.
But of what she represented.
Chaos.
Unpredictability.
Loss of control.
Everything I spent my entire life trying to avoid.
And yet...
“He’s not an idiot. He’s brilliant. He’s a neurosurgeon who saves people’s lives. He’s careful and thoughtful and yes, maybe a little too controlled sometimes, but that’s because he cares.”
She’d defended me.
To Vivian.
To my own sister, who knew every embarrassing story, every failure, every moment of weakness.
Athena had stood up for me.
A woman I had known for less than forty-eight hours.
A woman who was, by all objective measures, completely incompatible with me.
She’d seen something in me worth defending.
I closed my eyes again.
Tomorrow,I thought.Tomorrow, I’ll deal with the hospital. With the questions. With Fitz’s inevitable gloating.
Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to get an annulment.
Tomorrow, I’ll start putting my life back together.
But tonight...
Tonight I was just going to lie here in my perfectly ordered bed, in my perfectly ordered apartment, and pretend that everything was fine.
Even though I knew,knew... that tomorrow was going to be absolute chaos.
