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“So do you.”

That almost makes his mouth move.

Almost.

I check the monitor anyway because I’m here and because apparently I don’t know how not to. Sinus rhythm now. Better pressure. Labs still ugly, but not catastrophic. He lets me look without comment.

Finally he says, “I spoke to the doctors.”

“I’m sure that was exhausting for everyone.”

He ignores that. “They tell me you saved my life.”

I don’t answer.

He watches me for a moment longer. “When you could have let me die and watched all your problems disappear.”

I lean one shoulder against the wall and fold my arms. “I did consider it.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. There it is. The smallest, driest acknowledgment of humor from a man who nearly died six hours ago. “That sounds more honest than I expected.”

“I’m too tired to lie well.”

He lets the silence sit for a second. Then, more quietly, “Why didn’t you?”

That question has more than one answer.

Because she would have had to live with it. Because despite everything, I am still a doctor, and training is just another word for reflex when the body starts going wrong in front of you. Because letting him die would not have erased anything cleanly; it would have made Maggie carry another corpse around in her conscience and told me I’d done her a kindness.

None of those are simple answers.

So I give him the one he’ll hate most. “Because I’m not you.”

His eyes narrow slightly, but he doesn’t rise to it. Not fully. He’s too weak, and perhaps too honest in the aftermath of almost dying. “That’s fair,” he says.

For a moment we just look at each other.

Then he says, “She was frightened.”

The sentence catches me off guard.

Not because he noticed. Of course he noticed. But because he’s saying it now, without strategy in his voice, without any immediate use for the observation.

“Yes,” I say.

He looks down at his own hands, the tape and bruising at the IV site, the body turned suddenly unreliable. “I didn’t mean for that.”

I laugh once, quietly. “That may be the first time you’ve said something today that doesn’t help either of us.”

His gaze lifts again. I think he’s going to push back, but he doesn’t.

Instead he says, “I know what she is to you.”

The room stills around that.

I don’t answer. He doesn’t need me to.

“And I know,” he continues, “that whatever happened tonight did not make that simpler.”