The clinic was on the other side of town, past a laundromat and a nail salon with a hand-painted sign. I picked it because no one I knew would ever have a reason to walk past it.

I filled out the intake form with my own name. Elliot Sullivan. Date of birth. Emergency contact. I stared at that line for a long time. Then I wrote Naomi's number instead of his.

I paid in cash. I'd taken it out over three separate days, small amounts, nothing that would show up as a pattern on a statement he never checked anyway.

The waiting room had fluorescent lights that hummed if you listened for it. I sat with a clipboard balanced on my knees and watched a woman across from me hold her partner's hand. He kept smoothing his thumb over her knuckles, over and over, like he was trying to memorize the shape of her hand before something changed it.

No one held mine. I hadn't expected anyone to. I'd just never pictured it quite like this, so plain, so fluorescent.

When they called my name, I stood up on legs that felt borrowed and followed a nurse in blue scrubs down a hallway that smelled like antiseptic and burnt coffee.

I don't remember most of it. I remember the paper gown. I remember counting backward from ten and only getting to seven. I remember waking up cold, with a nurse pressing a cup of water into my hand and telling me to sip slowly.

I took a cab home. The driver had the radio on low, some talk show host arguing with a caller about parking regulations, and I watched the city go by in smears of light and thought about nothing. I was very good, by then, at thinking about nothing.

The penthouse was empty when I let myself in. I didn't know where Gael was and I didn't check. I went straight to the guest room, climbed into the narrow bed still in my coat, and stared at the ceiling.

The sky outside the window went from black to grey to a pale, meaningless gold. I watched every stage of it. I didn't sleep. I didn't cry, either, not really — just a slow, steady leak at the corners of my eyes that I wiped away without thinking, the way you'd wipe condensation off a glass.

Handle it, he'd said.

I had.

—

Aspen was Priscilla's idea, though it came out of Gael's mouth at the breakfast table like it was his. "A few days at the lodge," he said, not looking up from his phone. "Change of scenery."

I still hadn't told him. There wasn't a version of that conversation I could survive twice.

We flew out on a Thursday. The lodge was all glass and cedar, snow banked against the windows in soft blue drifts. I was still tender in ways no one could see — tired in my bones, careful with how I moved, the kind of fragile that doesn't show up unless you're looking for it, and no one was looking.

Friday evening, we went up to the slope so Priscilla could show off a run she claimed to have skied as a girl. I stayed near the lodge, wrapped in a coat too heavy for how little I weighed that week, and watched them from the deck. Gael's arm out to steady her. Her laugh carrying thin across the cold air.

Then she stumbled.

It happened in slow motion, the way rehearsed things always do if you're paying close enough attention. Her knees buckled. Her hand flew to her chest. She made a small, breathless sound, and Gael was there before she finished falling, catching her elbow, her waist, saying her name twice, fast, like it was an alarm.

"I can't — I can't breathe," she gasped, and even from the deck I could hear how carefully that sentence had been shaped, how it landed exactly where it needed to.

Gael didn't look back once.

He half-carried her toward the resort's medical center, shouting for someone to bring the car around, his voice sharp with a fear I hadn't heard him use for me in seven years. Staff scattered after them — the concierge, a ski instructor, someone from housekeeping. Within ten minutes, the lodge had emptied out entirely, doors swinging shut behind the last of them, the quiet settling in so fast it felt like the building itself had exhaled.

I stood on the deck a while longer, watching the taillights disappear down the mountain road.

Then I went inside, alone, into a house gone completely silent, and I told myself it was fine. I told myself I only needed to rest.

I didn't know yet how wrong I was.

The pain woke me at three in the morning.

Not the dull ache I'd been managing for days. Something sharper. Wet. I reached down under the blanket and my hand came back dark.

I sat up too fast. The room tilted. I pressed my palm against my stomach and felt warmth spreading, soaking through my nightshirt, through the sheets beneath me. Too much warmth. Too fast.

"Gael."

I said it once into the dark. Not loud. I didn't have the air for loud.

No answer. The lodge was silent around me, that specific mountain silence that feels like being buried in cotton. I turned my head toward the door and remembered — his room was down the hall. The master suite. Priscilla's room now.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold under my feet. I stood, or tried to. My knees went soft halfway up and I caught myself on the nightstand, knocking over the glass of water I'd left there hours ago. It hit the floor and didn't break, just rolled under the bed in slow motion while I watched it like it mattered.

The bathroom. I just needed to get to the bathroom.

I made it three steps before my vision went white at the edges. I grabbed the doorframe and held on, counting breaths, waiting for the white to recede. It didn't. It just got brighter, louder, like static filling up my skull.

I don't remember the next part clearly. I remember the tile floor against my cheek. Cold. I remember pulling a towel off the rack and pressing it between my legs, holding it there with both hands like that might be enough. I remember thinking, very clearly, that I needed to call someone.

I couldn't reach my phone. I'd left it charging on the nightstand, ten feet away, a distance that might as well have been ten miles.

"Gael," I said again. Quieter this time. Not because I thought he'd hear. Just because his name was the only word left in my mouth.

The towel turned red. Then it stopped being a color I could name and just became something dark and heavy in my hands.

I thought about the woman in the clinic waiting room. The way her partner had held her hand. I thought about how I'd told myself I didn't need that, that I was fine alone, that I'd always been fine alone.

I wasn't fine.

The tile was so cold. I closed my eyes and thought about nothing, the way I'd gotten so good at, and somewhere far away I heard a door open and close, footsteps, Gael's voice saying something to someone in the hall. Priscilla's laugh. Soft. Pleased.

Then nothing.

—

I woke up to beeping.

Steady, mechanical, something counting time beside my head. I tried to open my eyes and the light was too bright, hospital bright, the kind that doesn't let you hide.

A nurse leaned over me. "You're awake. Good. Don't try to sit up yet."

I didn't try. I just lay there and stared at the ceiling tiles and counted the holes in them — dozens, hundreds, a pattern I couldn't find the logic of.

"What happened," I said. My voice came out wrong. Dry.

"You hemorrhaged." She adjusted something on the IV pole. "The housekeeper found you this morning. You're very lucky she came in early."

Lucky. I turned the word over in my head and it didn't fit anywhere.

"Your husband's outside," she added. "I'll let him know you're awake."

She left before I could tell her not to.

Gael came in a few minutes later. He stood at the foot of the bed, hands in his pockets, looking at me the way he looked at quarterly reports when the numbers didn't add up.

"What happened," he said.

Not *are you okay.* Not *I was worried.* Just the same question I'd asked, flat and factual, like I owed him an explanation for the inconvenience.

"I don't know," I said. It wasn't a lie. I didn't know the medical term for what had gone wrong. I just knew it had.

The doctor came in behind him. Young, tired, a badge clipped to her coat that said *Dr. Patel, Attending Physician.* She glanced at Gael, then at me, and something careful settled over her face.

"Post-surgical complications," she said. "We had to take you into emergency surgery to stop the bleeding. You lost a significant amount of blood. Another hour and—" She stopped. "You're stable now."

Gael didn't ask what surgery. He didn't ask when, or why, or how I'd ended up on a bathroom floor bleeding out while he was somewhere else.

He just nodded once, the way he nodded in meetings when someone confirmed a delivery date.

"How long before she can travel," he said.

"A few days. She needs rest."

"Fine." He looked at me again, briefly, and I saw nothing in his face that I could hold onto. "I'll have someone bring your things from the lodge."

He turned to leave.

That's when I saw her.

Priscilla, standing in the doorway, half-hidden behind the frame. She wasn't looking at Gael. She was looking at me. And her mouth — just the corner of it — curved up.

Not a smile, exactly. Something smaller. Quieter.

Satisfied.

She stepped back into the hallway before Gael noticed her, and the door swung shut, and I was alone again with the beeping and the IV and the holes in the ceiling tiles I still couldn't count all the way through.

I closed my eyes.

Handle it, I thought.

I almost laughed. But laughing hurt too much, so I just lay there and breathed, in and out, in and out, and tried to remember what I'd been holding onto before the blood, before the cold, before the towel turned dark in my hands.

I couldn't remember.

Maybe there was nothing.