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I wanted to say yes. I wanted the quiet of his car. His apartment. Winston. I wanted someone else to carry the silence for a while.

“Not yet,” I said.

He didn’t argue. He didn’t search for another way around my answer or soften it into a compromise. I watched him accept it exactly as I had given it.

“Charlotte’s coming,” I said. “I called her. She’s on her way.”

He nodded. “All right.”

* * *

Charlotte came through the doors like weather.

She had clearly broken several laws to arrive that quickly, and she was wearing something she had plainly pulled on in the dark. She walked over to the hospital exit and had her arms around me before she had finished saying my name.

She didn’t ask what had happened. She would ask later. Every detail. Relentlessly.

Not now. Now she simply held on.

I rested my forehead against her shoulder and let myself be held by someone who asked nothing of me, arranged nothing, and simply arrived.

Over Charlotte’s shoulder, I saw Alexander step back.

It was such a small movement that I might have missed it. He didn’t try to follow. When Charlotte finally looked up and saw him, she offered the smallest nod. He returned it.

“Come on,” Charlotte said softly. “Let’s get you home. You don’t have to say a single word until you’re ready.”

I let her steer me toward her car. As I took a seat, I looked back. Alexander was where I had left him. He lifted one arm, very slightly, then lowered his hand. It wasn’t a wave, hardly a gesture at all. He watched us go.

* * *

Alexander

I stood there a long time after Charlotte’s car had disappeared.

I kept watching after they were gone, the way a man continues to look at a doorway long after the person he loves has passed through it.

There had been a time, not so long ago, when I would have mistaken that for failure. I would have found another solution. A kinder one, I would have called it. Tonight, I finally understood that there was nothing left to solve.

She had not said no. She had said not yet.

The only thing it asked of me was patience. I could do that.

It was the hardest thing I had ever agreed to do, and perhaps that was because it was the first thing love had ever asked of me.

I turned up my collar against the cold and walked out into the night to find my own way home.

Chapter 29

Emilia

I woke in my own bed to the smell of coffee and an overcast sky. The morning had arrived, regardless of whether I was ready for it.

For a few quiet seconds, I simply lay there, aware only of the familiar shape of my room, the weight of the blankets, and the distant sound of someone moving through my kitchen.

The memories returned. The red light above the elevator doors, the abandoned laboratory, Victoria waiting in the shadows, the syringe, the struggle, Alexander’s voice saying my name with desperation and fear.

I closed my eyes and sat with them. There was no point in resisting them. Yesterday felt impossibly far away, yet it had still changed everything.