Page 136 of Fate, Interrupted

I push to my feet.

Logan straightens immediately, his gaze tracking me. “Where are you going?”

I don’t answer. I turn toward the corridor, toward the set of double doors at the far end of the hall. I stand there for a moment, looking at the doors.

My hands flex at my sides. I hear what my father is saying. The logic of it, the ironclad construction of a man who has been building toward this conclusion since Logan’s phone call. I understand the pattern doesn’t stop at the city limits, that the world is what it is, that choosing her doesn’t change the external facts of either of our lives.

All of it. I don’t care about any of it.

When I turn back, they’re all watching me.

I look at my father.

Not as the middle son, the loose cannon, the playboy, or the one who doesn’t carry what Logan carries. Not as the boy who got picked up by the cops, who needed handling, whose messes needed cleaning up, who could never quite unseat his older brother, no matter how hard he worked the angles.

“We’re fated,” I say.

Two words.

No elaboration. I offer no defense or explanation of what it means, because Elias knows what it means. He knows what that word means in the part of him that existed before the business, before the authority, before the structure he built around the loss of a woman he loved.

For a moment he doesn’t speak, and in that moment, His expression softens in a way I’ve never seen before. Regret, perhaps.

He doesn’t argue. Or dismiss it. He simply stands there in the waiting room. And for the first time, my father looks like a man hollowed out by grief.

I can’t say anything more. I don’t have the capacity for it tonight.

Greer is still watching me. What’s on his face now is not surprise. It was never surprise. He already knew. He gives me the smallest nod.

An acknowledgment—I see you. I know what this is. I’ve known for a while. The nod of a man who has been waiting for this moment.

I look at Logan. He’s been watching me since I turned back, and what’s on his face isn’t careful neutrality.

“She’s your mate,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Then go.”

Two words.

The only two words that matter.

I turn again, and this time I don’t look back.

Norah is in a room at the end of this corridor, coming out of surgery. She’s my fate, and I’m going to be in a chair beside her bed when she wakes up.

That’s all. It’s everything.

Chapter thirty-nine

Norah

The first thing I’m aware of is the light.

It comes through the window at the low angle of early morning, not committed to being day yet. It catches the edge of a curtain, the rail of a bed, the institutional white of a ceiling that belongs to only one kind of building. My brain, having apparently survived whatever happened to the rest of me, begins the slow and unglamorous work of assembling these details into a conclusion.

I’m in a hospital, and it’s almost morning.