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I shove his hand off me, harder this time. He catches my shoulder. The chair goes over sideways. Something metal hits the floor with a crack that makes Maggie gasp behind us.

“Stop!” she says.

Neither of us does.

“You think this is a game?” Alester asks. “I can end your career with paperwork alone. One complaint, one inquiry, one file opened in the right office, and you’re finished.”

My jaw tightens. “You’ve wanted that for years.”

He’s angrier now. Not louder, but sloppier around the edges, his face ballooning and turning almost purple at the control pulling too tight to look effortless anymore. “You were warned,” he says. “You were told to stay away from her privately and professionally, and still here you are⁠—”

“She called for me.”

“No,” he says, eyes cutting toward the bed. “She didn’t. But you just can’t let it go. Must you always play the gallant knight?”

I turn just enough to see her face.

She understands now. All of it. The silence, the leaving, the pressure I never fully explained. For one awful second her expression is naked—hurt, guilt, anger, all of it there at once—and I hate him so much for making her learn it this way that I barely feel myself move again.

This time I catch him by the front of his jacket and slam him back a step.

The sound Maggie makes is sharp enough that it finally cuts through whatever’s left of my temper.

The curtain jerks open.

Simone is there first, pharmacy bag in one hand, eyes huge. Behind her the doctor appears, already saying, “What the hell is going on?”

Maggie’s voice cracks through the room before either of them can reach us.

“Stop it!”

Everything halts at once.

Because she’s half upright in the bed now, IV tugging at her arm, face drained of color, breathing too fast. The monitor is screaming. And all at once the shape of what we’re doing becomes visible from the outside—two grown men in a hospital room, turning her crisis into their own.

I let go of Alester immediately.

He lets go too.

The doctor moves toward the bed. Simone is there a second ahead of him, grabbing Maggie’s shoulder gently, telling her to breathe, to lie back, to stop trying to fix things with force of will.

I step away.

Alester adjusts his jacket as if that somehow restores dignity to what just happened.

Maggie looks from me to him and back again. There are tears in her eyes now, not dramatic tears, not even fully fallen. Just enough to make everything in her face look more exhausted.

Then she says the thing I should have known she would say. “You don’t have to keep protecting me.”

I stare at her.

Her voice is shaking, but she keeps going. “I chose this.”

“No,” I say immediately. “Maggie⁠—”

She cuts me off with a look. “I did,” she says. “I signed it. I stayed. I kept going back. Whatever he is, whatever this is, I chose it.”

“That doesn’t mean⁠—”