Kara slipped in, checked the monitor, made a small approving sound at some number, and watched the tart with professional suspicion.
"Any nausea?"
"Medium," Willow said.
"Give it a minute." Kara scribbled without looking up. To Zane: "Good choice. Tart is easier than cream."
"Luck," he said.
"Observation," Kara corrected, leaving again. The door sighed behind her.
They sat with the smell of lemon and the thin, institutional sunlight laying order on the room.
"Why are you really here?" Willow asked finally, as if the question had simply ripened.
He clocked the edge and filed it under pain, not doubt. As far as he believed, the amnesia was real; the lie belonged to Miles alone. If she was reaching for something steady, he could be that—unfair as it was, wanted as it was.
"Because you shouldn't have to eat hospital pudding," he said.
A huff of air that wasn't a laugh, wasn't not. "Or because my boyfriend should bring me something decent?" She laid just enough emphasis on the word to make it do tricks.
The word did something to his chest anyway. A small, traitorous rhythm misfired, then corrected. "If that's useful to you," he said, steady.
"Useful," she repeated softly, as if testing its edges. "Everything's very useful this week."
He didn't rise to the bait. He watched her instead: the way her hand curled against the blanket, how she kept her face arranged like code—clean, minimal, indented properly—so no bug betrayed itself in public.
"You believed him," he said, almost to the window.
"Who?" Her tone was light and poisonous.
"Miles. About… us." He forced the last word through a narrow gate.
She tilted her head like a cat hearing a sound only it can hear. "Shouldn't I?" She let a tiny smile happen, the kind that could be read as shy from across a room and as razor-sharp from three feet away. "He said I chose you."
The sentence took a moment to settle in him. He pictured the corridor the day before, the doctor speaking carefully, Miles improvising too quickly, the moment tightening into something irreversible. The lie hanging like a cheap painting, his nod pinning it to the wall. He had nodded because hesitation would have made it worse. He had chosen steadiness over chaos.
"I did not say that," he answered.
"You nodded."
"I did," he said evenly. "You were coming out of shock. I was not going to create more confusion."
Her lashes lowered slightly. "One way of putting it."
He did not apologize. He did not retract it. He held her gaze without flinching.
"Tell me something else you noticed," she said suddenly. "At Hale and Sons."
He blinked. "What?"
"You remembered a tart and a sentence." She lifted her uninjured hand and traced a small circle in the air. "Add another line."
He searched his memory and found it intact. "You wore a black dress. Not because it was safe. Because it held the room still. The charity board kept pushing brighter things around you, champagne flutes, gold centerpieces, a red backdrop for photographs, but you kept your glass filled with water. You said compliments were conversational potholes."
A breath escaped her. It might have been a laugh's ghost. "You listened more than I thought."
"I watched," he said, and didn't add too much.
"From your corner," she said.
"Yes."
"And you didn't like me," she added, just to see what he'd do.
He let the lie sit on the bed between them and didn't touch it. "I said unkind things," he answered. It was the nearest thing to truth that wouldn't detonate them both.
She considered him, then looked down at the tart again, its neat geometry wounded by the missing bites. "People say unkind things when they need to believe them," she said, almost to herself. "It keeps the world organized."
He thought of all the years he'd arranged his world like that: right angles, clean edges, contempt standing guard over want. "Sometimes," he said.
A volunteer in a cherry-red vest knocked and poked a head in. "Book cart," she sang, in a voice that belonged in classrooms. "Romance, mystery, memoir—"
"Later," Kara called from the station, and the cart rolled on, trailing paper and mercy.
Willow's gaze followed it, then returned to him. "So. If we're doing this—" the word tasted like metal—"and I'm your… girlfriend." She watched his mouth not react. "What does that make you?"
He took longer than he should have to answer, measuring the word against his mouth like a suit he didn't own. "Accountable."
She hadn't expected that one. A small crack opened in her posture; light slid through. "To whom?"
"You," he said, and felt the ground move.
Silence settled between them again, but its temperature shifted. It was no longer cold. It was something that could be inhabited without injury.
He rose slowly from the chair. For a moment he stood beside the bed, close enough to rest his hand on the rail, not touching her, simply grounding himself in the room and in the version of the day he intended to stand behind. The metal was cool beneath his palm. He let that steadiness anchor him before he stepped back.
Then he turned and walked toward the door.
Before he reached it, she said his name.
He stopped and looked over his shoulder.
"If he comes back," she said carefully, meaning Miles without needing to say it, "I may need you to stay."
He studied her face. "Stay how?"
"Just there," she said, her gaze flicking briefly toward the space beside the bed. "Not fixing it. Not explaining it. Just… there."
He nodded once. "I can do that."
"Noted," she said, and her mouth almost curved.
He left before that almost turned into either a yes or a goodbye.
In the corridor, he leaned against the cool wall for the length of one breath. Downstairs, a phone vibrated in his pocket—messages he didn't read. The ward murmured and moved around him. He walked to the elevator with empty hands and felt, absurdly, like he was carrying something heavy.
Behind him, in a room that already knew too much about pain, a woman in a bandage ate one more impossible bite of lemon and practiced a smile she might one day mean. She didn't trust him. She pretended she did. The pretending was its own violence.
Still, when Kara came in to swap charts, she found the tart tucked on the tray and the flowers not yet wilting, and she nodded to herself at nothing in particular, like a person who recognizes a pattern just beginning to form.
As for Zane, he stepped into the elevator and let the doors close between him and the ward, between him and the tart, between him and the way her voice had wrapped the word boyfriend in something both soft and edged. The car began to rise. He watched his reflection climb one floor, then another, until it settled into the version of his face he would carry elsewhere: the man learning to move slowly, the man who had chosen his words carefully and lived with them, the man who had, for the first time in years, left sweetness behind without trying to control what it would become.