The collapse of a man is not a loud event. It’s a tectonic shift behind the eyes. A silent, catastrophic failure of the foundations upon which he has built his entire reality. I watched it happen to Julian Thorne in the space of three heartbeats.
His gaze, which had been locked on the box of infant Calpol in my hand, flickered to the brightly-colored onesie hanging in the corner. It was a stupidly cheerful thing, a scrap of impossible softness in this world of blood and canvas. Then his eyes shot back to my face, to my abdomen, flat and scarred beneath my lab coat. He was a master of data, of piecing together disparate facts to form a profitable picture. And now, he was running the most devastating calculation of his life.
The plane crash. A year ago. The abrupt severance. The pregnancy
