Page 223

“I know.”

“Stop saying that.”

A wet, tired almost-smile touches his mouth. “I can’t seem to.”

That makes me cry again, which feels excessive but apparently still available to me as an option. He pulls me back into him before the tears can fully fall, one hand in my hair, the other holding me with quiet certainty, and for a little while neither of us says anything else.

Because there is nothing left to say that won’t hurt.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

DALTON

I take Maggie home myself.

She doesn’t argue with me about it, which is how I know she’s more exhausted than she wants to admit. She’s quiet in the passenger seat, one hand low against her stomach, the other curled in her lap. Every so often I glance over just to make sure she’s still with me, still breathing evenly, still only tired and not slipping back into pain.

Neither of us says much.

There isn’t much left to say tonight that wouldn’t break open into something bigger, and both of us are too worn out to survive that properly. So I drive. I keep the car smooth over every turn, every stop, every bump in the road. When we get to her building, I walk her to the door even though she tells me she can manage.

“I know,” I say.

She looks at me for a second, and there’s something in her face that almost undoes me.

“Your flight,” she says quietly.

“Not tonight.”

“No. But soon.”

I don’t answer that. Because if I do, we start talking about it again, and I can’t do that on her doorstep with the smell of rain and dust in the air and her eyes still swollen from crying.

She nods once like she understands the answer anyway.

Then she goes inside, and I wait until the light in her apartment turns on before I get back in the car and drive straight back to the hospital.

I don’t leave Alester’s side.

Not because I want to be there. Not because I owe him anything beyond the most technical reading of the word. But because I know his history better than most of the doctors now looking after him, and because if this goes badly again in the night, I’d rather be in the room than hearing about it.

Petra appears within ten minutes of me taking a chair outside the cardiac step-down room. She looks exactly as she always looks: immaculate, composed, faintly disapproving, as if the world has once again failed to follow the schedule she prepared for it. Her gaze moves from me to the room and back again.

“You’re still here.”

I don’t look up from the chart in my hand. “Clearly.”

“He has a team.”

“Yes.”

“Then you can leave.”

I turn a page. “And yet I haven’t.”

That earns me a silence sharp enough to feel.

Petra steps closer. “Mr. Chandler will be adequately cared for.”