Adrian's POV
She didn't answer the question.
I lay in the recovery room after she left and listened to the monitors and thought about that. If you had known the truth five years ago — all of it — would you still have left? Five seconds of silence and then her name for me, quiet and final, and the sound of a door.
Not an answer. Not a refusal. Something in between that I didn't have the right to push past.
I didn't sleep. Not because of pain, though the chest was making its position known in ways that were going to get more detailed before they got less. It was something else. The particular wakefulness of a man who had just had his sternum opened and closed and was now lying in the dark accounting for everything that had accumulated on either side of it.
Six hours on a table. Three ye
