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“Shh, Eddie.” Tears made my vision swim. “The doctor will get you all fixed up.”

I’d never, ever cried over a patient. I’d never allowed it. Yet, for the first time, I couldn’t control it.

“I’ll be all right either way,” he said.

“Don’t say such things.”

“My soul is at peace.” He grimaced. “I got to hold my Violet. Annie and Peter have never been happier.”

“Don’t, Eddie.” Tears streamed down my face now. The color was slipping from his face, and the gauze was saturated. No amount of pressure slowed the rush of blood.

“You saved me, Eva.” He lifted his left hand and grabbed my arm, his grip weak but his motions controlled. “You saved us all.”

Nurses flooded around the vehicle, flung the door open, and helped to ease Eddie onto the stretcher.

Dr. Harrison strode toward the commotion, and I told him as much as I could—the location of the bullet, the amount of blood I estimated him to have lost. Then the doors of the hospital closed, the staff disappeared with their patient, and I staggered on the sidewalk, utterly spent.

I felt Warren beside me long before I saw him in my periphery. He gripped my arms and steadied me. Just as my knees buckled, he was there.

He caught me, and I pressed my face to his chest, unable to hold it together. He wrapped his arms around me and held me while I sobbed into his shirt.

How had everything gone so completely sideways?

What would Violet say when she found out?

Eddie’s words echoed. “You saved me, Eva.”

I hadn’t saved anyone. Death followed me like a parasite and infected everyone and everything I loved.

Who would it take next?

Warren

Hours passed with Eddie in surgery.

Violet and the children had come to the hospital, their faces blank with shock. All of ours were.

Eva’s especially.

I’d held her outside the hospital for as long as she let me. My shirt was wet with her tears, stained with the blood of my friend.

Everything whirled around me. The attacker getting away. Eddie’s life hanging by a thread. Violet returning to this. Almost losing Eva.

I’d had close calls before. These were different.

I watched her, still afraid of her disappearing right under my nose.

Violet and Annie clung to each other on a sofa in the waiting area. Peter stared at the ground with his arms crossed. I’d assured him that this hadn’t been his fault. He’d been tricked.

But if his father died, I didn’t know if any words I spoke would set him at ease.

Eva paced down the hall, closest to the operating room and far from Eddie’s family, a limp that she tried to hide visible through it all. I leaned on the wall in between her and the waiting area.

A nurse approached me again and asked to clean up my cheek and apply a few stitches. I waved her off. I wouldn’t leave this room until we knew Eddie’s fate.

Eva approached the nurse, took the supplies from her hands, and walked up to me. “Sit down, Captain,” she said in the commanding way she’d mastered. “That needs cleaning.”

We sat on the other side of the waiting room to give Violet and the kids space. Eva’s expression twisted in pain whenever she looked their way.