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“It means,” she says, and now her voice breaks a little, “that I’m tired of everyone acting like I’m standing in the middle of my own life by accident.”

The room goes very still.

Because she’s right in the way truth often is when it arrives at the wrong time—wrong in pieces, right in the center.

Simone looks at me like she wants me to say something useful for once in my life.

I have nothing. Not that she’ll hear. Not now.

Maggie turns to Alester. “Take me home.”

The words hit harder than anything else in the room.

The doctor starts, “I’d prefer she stay⁠—”

“I’ll stay if medically necessary,” she says without looking away from Alester. “But I’m done with this. Him. Here.”

Her eyes flick to me on the word him. That’s how I know she means it.

I could argue. I could tell her this is exactly what Alester wants. I could say she’s exhausted and frightened and doesn’t need to make this decision now. I could tell her she’s handing herself back to a man who just threatened two doctors in a hospital corridor of all places and would still call himself reasonable afterward.

All of that would be for me. And she has had enough done to her for my reasons. So I say nothing.

I stand there while the doctor checks her again, while Simone glares at both of us as if she’d like to have us sterilized for the public good, while Alester says something low to the doctor in that same maddeningly calm voice of his.

Then Maggie looks at me one last time. So tired that for a second all I want is to cross the room and hold her till I know she’s okay.

Instead, I step back.

It’s the only mercy I have left to offer.

“All right,” I say.

She blinks at me, maybe surprised I’m not fighting this, maybe hating that I’m not. I don’t know. I only know that if I push now, I become one more man insisting he knows what should happen to her next.

So I let her go.

And for the first time since I met her, it feels exactly like losing.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

MAGGIE

By the time they discharge me, I feel wrung out.

The pain has eased enough that everyone is satisfied I’m not actively about to collapse, which apparently counts as good news now. They tell me to rest. To avoid stress. To follow up. To call if anything changes.

As if stress is a switch I forgot to turn off on my way in.

Alester handles the discharge papers with the same cool efficiency he brings to everything else. He speaks to the nurse, signs where he needs to sign, thanks the doctor in a voice so measured it almost sounds kind. Simone hovers long enough to make sure I’m walking on my own and then gives me a look that says she hates leaving me with him.

I hate it too.

But the only reason I’m going with him at all is Dalton.

That’s the thought I keep circling back to.

Alester made the rules of this ugly enough that every decision now feels like a bargain with the devil, and if going with him buys Dalton a little distance, a little room, then fine. I can survive one more car ride.