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I learn later that I’m at Columbia Presbyterian. Luca—it had to be Luca—got me admitted under a name that isn’t mine, scrubbed the crash from every police blotter in the city, and paid whoever needed paying. I learn that I died twice.

Once in the ambulance and once on the table.

But the first thing I learn, the first true thing in that hazy chemical fog, is her.

She comes into the room reading a chart, and the world, which has been smeared and doubled for days, snaps into perfect focus for the first time.

She’s tall and lean, wearing a sky-blue blouse tucked into fitted black dress pants with a stethoscope hanging around her neck. Her white coat has writing on the right breast side, but I can’t read it.

Her dark brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail that’s losing its fight, and loose waves escape around her face.

She looks tired the way only doctors can, but when she lifts her eyes from the chart and finds me awake, she smiles, and something in my shattered chest moves that has nothing to do with broken ribs.

“Well,” she says. “Look who decided to rejoin the living.”

Her voice. Her voice. The one from the wreckage. The one I followed out of the dark.

“You were there,” I rasp, unable to stop staring at her. My throat is sandpaper from the intubation. “At the crash.”

She nods. “I was on my way home when I saw it happen. Lucky for you, I never learned how to mind my own business.” She crosses to the bed, checks the monitors, and her fingers brush my wrist as she takes my pulse the old-fashioned way, skin to skin, and I feel that touch travel up my arm like a current. “I’m Dr. Katerina Sokolov. I’ll be looking after you while you’re here.”

Katerina.

I’m bandaged to hell and back. Forty percent of my body is bruised. There’s a plate in my arm and a tube in my chest, and I hurt in ways I didn’t know a body could hurt.

And lying there, broken into pieces, I look at this woman and think one word, clear as a bell through the morphine haze.

Angel.

For three weeks, she treats me like I matter.

Not like a payday, or a threat, or like the name that makes men fearful in this city.

She doesn’t know that name.

She knows the fake one on my chart, and she treats him—that fiction, that nobody—like his life is the most valuable thing in the world.

She argues with other doctors about my pain management.

She catches an infection two other doctors missed.

She comes by at the end of shifts she didn’t have to extend, just to check, just to talk, just to look at me with those warm brown eyes like I’m a man instead of a monster.

She has no idea what she’s saving.

When I’m healed enough to vanish, I do what creatures like me do.

I disappear back into the dark.

Two years.

That’s how long I’ve been watching her.

It started as gratitude, at least that’s the lie I told myself, anyway. A man should know who saved his life.

So I had my people pull everything: the Stuyvesant transcripts, the Columbia med school records, the residency evaluations that read like love letters from her attendings.

Brilliant. Relentless.