MARGARET’S POV
I have lived long enough to know when fate is circling. It doesn’t announce itself loudly, not the way youth imagines it will. It arrives softly, almost kindly, and then it waits to see if you will be brave enough to act. I sit by the window of my hospital room, watching the late afternoon sun spill across the garden below, my hands folded in my lap, my heart restless in a way it has not been in years.
Alex thinks I am recovering. In truth, I am remembering. I remember the look in his eyes when I told him. The way his face went pale, as though the ground beneath his certainty had cracked open. The way love and fear collided in him, raw and unfiltered.
My grandson loves that girl, and he is about to lose her.
Worse, he is about to lose his child. I have seen this before.
