Page 65 of Don’t Say Mafia

The attendant cleared her throat softly, clearly uncomfortable, and then opened the door. The room beyond was stark and unforgiving with its white walls and stainless steel. There were several tables lined up in a row, but only one with a sheet drawn neatly over a body.

I froze, and my legs refused to move as I began to panic. This was it. The point of no return. Once I saw him like this, I couldn’t unsee it.

My stomach dropped, and my limbs went distant, suddenly no longer feeling like my own. Was I about to pass out? The air in here felt thinner, like it wasn’t actually oxygen at all. Jagger’s arm tightened around my shoulders just enough to remind me he was there. “You don’t have to look,” he murmured.

“Yes, I do,” I told him in a choked voice. Step by step, I forced myself forward. My heart pounded so loudly I was sure everyone could hear it.

The attendant gripped the edge of the sheet and folded it back in one smooth, practiced motion, and Ryan’s face emerged, all his color drained to a waxy gray, his lips tinged faintly blue. One side of his jaw was swollen and mottled with dark bruising that crawled down his neck. A jagged scrape cut across his forehead, stitched but still angry and red against the pallor. His hair was stiff with dried blood near the temple.

My breath snagged as I stared at him in shock.

More of him came into view as the sheet lowered to his chest. Purple-black shadows bloomed beneath the thin hospital gown. His collarbone jutted at a wrong angle. There were abrasions along his shoulder, and road rash all over him.

Ryan’s mouth hung slightly open, like whatever he’d been about to say had been stolen mid-breath . . . his last words never making it out. His lashes lay still against skin that looked dusted in ash, no rise, no flutter—nothing left to argue with or forgive.

This morning he’d been standing in our living room. Now he looked carved out from the inside, as if someone had scooped away everything that made him Ryan and left only the outline behind.

The color was gone. The restless energy. The constant commentary. Even the tension I’d carried toward him felt misplaced here, with nowhere to land.

I remembered him on that playground swing years ago, pushing off with his sneakers, grinning at me with the easy certainty that I was already his future. He’d kissed me with the reckless confidence only young men have and promised forever as though it was something he could manufacture.

That boy didn’t exist on this table.

This—this was a shell arranged under fluorescent lights. A body zipped open and stitched closed. A story cut short without punctuation.

Whatever spark had once animated him was gone.

And I was staring at the aftermath.

The sob that ripped through me felt feral. Loud. Uncontained.

It wasn’t graceful grief. It was ugly and shaking and full of too many things at once—shock and guilt and memory. It clawed up my throat and left me trembling in its wake.

Jagger pulled me into his chest, and I clung to him. “It’s going to be all right, Eden. I promise, baby.” The conviction in his voice undid me even more.

Because it just reminded me that Ryan had promised we’d be all right once, too.

And here I was, standing in a room that smelled like chemicals and endings, wrapped in another man’s arms while my husband lay cold on a metal table behind me.

I felt split open.

Part of me was grieving the boy on the playground swing, the reckless promises, the version of us that had once felt simple.

Part of me was staring at the table behind us, knowing that whatever we’d become lately—resentment, frustration, exhaustion—it would never be resolved now.

No closure. No final conversation. Just an abrupt, brutal full stop.

I would never get to say the words I’d rehearsed in my head.

And now they would live inside me forever.

CHAPTER 15

EDEN

Iwoke up staring at the ceiling.

My eyes were open, but my body felt disconnected, like it hadn’t gotten the message that morning had arrived. The ceiling fan above me turned in slow, uneven circles, its blades edged with thick lines of dust that never quite disappeared no matter how often I wiped them down. A thin crack split the plaster near the vent, spidering outward as though it had been there forever.