Page 133 of Fate, Interrupted

“He needed to know,” Logan says. “This isn’t something I could…”

“I’ve got it,” I say.

“Silas…”

“I said I’ve got it.”

Still measured. But harder than usual underneath. The worn-down feeling of a man who knows exactly what is coming and has been preparing for it since the moment Logan sat down.

Neither of us speaks.

I’ve been avoiding the words for weeks. Time to use them both.

She’s my fate. She has been since that first afternoon.

Elias is in a car somewhere, being driven here. I sit in the plastic chair and wait, the resentment a stone in my chest, because I already know exactly what’s about to walk through those doors.

He’ll make this into a problem to solve—with edges and solutions and next steps.

And I’m going to have to look at my father and say the second word, the word that matters. Mate. It won’t change anything he’s already decided. But it’s true, and she’s in surgery, and if there was ever a moment to stop calling it anything else, it’s now.

Chapter thirty-eight

Silas

The room changes before the sound of the doors opening announces my father’s arrival.

There is a subtle tightening in the air, a reorientation of attention that moves outward and then pulls back in. Logan straightens slightly beside me, the movement imperceptible to anyone else. I don’t need to look.

I look anyway.

Elias crosses the threshold with the same measured pace he brings into every room, neither hurried nor hesitant, as if time corrects itself to him rather than the other way around. He takes in the waiting area in a single sweep—the chairs, the harsh light, the absence of movement, and then his gaze finds Logan.

A half-step behind him is Greer. His eyes find mine before Elias finishes crossing the room. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t nod, only looks at me, not with pity or alarm, not even with his normal careful blankness. He already knows what he’s walked into.

I don’t stand.

I watch them approach, aware of Logan moving from one foot to the other—a repositioning, the shaping of a man who is not choosing a side and is also absolutely choosing a side.

Elias stops in front of Logan first. They confer in low, terse voices. I watch Greer while this happens. He’s slightly apart, in the way he always positions himself—present without being intrusive, available without pressing. His hands are loose at his sides. His attention moves between the conversation and the corridor behind me, and at one point his gaze drops to my sleeve and stays there a moment before he pulls it back.

He’s been in rooms like this before. This type of room. He knows how to be in it. He knows how to be in it without making it worse.

Elias finishes with Logan. He takes two steps toward me and stops.

For a moment, no one speaks. His gaze drops briefly to my sleeve, then returns to my face. Whatever he reads in my face confirms how serious this is, because his expression immediately becomes contained.

“Is the girl going to live?”

I recognize it for what it is. A parameter. The first thing he needs established before anything else.

I look up at him. “Her name is Norah. And yes. They think so.”

He absorbs that. “Good. “ One word, delivered with the clean finality of an item checked off a list. Then: “Logan can drive. We’ll deal with the rest in the morning.”

“I’m not leaving,” I say.

He studies me. “There’s nothing more you can do here tonight,” he says. “The doctors have it.”