Page 135 of Fate, Interrupted

Logan shakes his head. “No.”

“Yes,” I say. “He is.”

There’s no surrender or self-pity. Only the thing that is true, stated simply, because there isn’t room for anything else.

I turn my attention back to Elias. “You made sure I didn’t have to be anything else,” I say. “That was the structure. I knew what the structure was.”

Elias inclines his head slightly. “And stepping outside of it without preparation was your alternative.”

“I was willing to learn,” I say. “That’s more than I can say for your structure.”

He regards me for a moment, then lets that pass without response, as if the statement doesn’t alter the conclusion. “Willingness doesn’t negate consequences,” he says. “And the consequence is sitting in an operating room because she was placed in proximity to you.”

The words land cold in my chest.

I can feel the edges of the conversation in her kitchen pressing in. How she moved around her house, easy and certain, letting her packing speak volumes about her trust in me. I can feel her hand in mine in the parking lot tonight. I can feel her rising onto her toes to plant a soft kiss on my lips.

But I can also feel the force of her hands on my back the split second before the boom of a gun.

I look at Greer again.

He’s lifted his head slightly. His gaze is somewhere in the middle distance between my father and me. His expression is careful and complicated. He’s family. He knew my mother well. He’s watched my father build everything around the loss of her and has never once said a word about what that cost or what it looked like from the outside.

He’s not saying anything now, either.

But he knows.

I sit here, watching my father tell me this was avoidable, watching Greer not say the thing he knows, and it hits me. Greer has softened it for me my entire life.

Greer has spent his adult life making my father’s certainty livable. Absorbing the edges of it. Understanding what was happening in rooms like this one, even when Elias didn’t. Always the more intuitive brother.

“She made a choice,” I say.

“She made a decision based on incomplete understanding,” Elias says. “You made one based on misplaced confidence.”

Logan’s restraint finally gives. “That’s enough,” he says, the words coming out harder than anything he’s said tonight. “You’re standing in a hospital waiting room talking about misplaced confidence while she’s in surgery. Do you hear yourself?”

“I hear myself clearly,” Elias says. Still not raising his voice. Still not looking at Logan. “That is precisely why I’m saying it.”

I lean forward, forearms on my thighs, my hands tightening together.

“She almost died because of me,” I say.

The sentence comes out raspy. Stripped down to the essential fact of it. Elias doesn’t contradict it.

That silence hits harder than anything he’s said.

I draw in a slow breath, then let it out. I feel the pieces of everything fall into place around me.

“It doesn’t stop,” I say. “You know that. I know that. Larkin will be what it is. The people in it will be what they are. Moving somewhere won’t make me not a wolf, and it won’t make Norah not human. It won’t make the world stop being what the world has always been.” I pause. “You’re right that there isn’t a place I can take her where that’s not true.”

Elias watches me. Waiting.

“But there also isn’t a version where I’m able to tell her she was wrong to choose it. She’s had every opportunity to walk away. She didn’t take them.”

“That speaks to her inexperience,” Elias says.

“No,” I say. “It speaks to who she is.”