Miles called just after sunrise, voice brisk and distant, too relieved to be decent.
"She's being discharged today," he said, each word clipped like he'd pared it with a knife. "You can handle the rest, right?"
Zane heard the subtext as clearly as if Miles had said it. I'm done performing.
The line clicked dead a beat too fast, and Zane stood in his kitchen with the phone still in his hand while the espresso machine hissed and quieted. Beyond the window, the city lifted its pale shoulders to the morning. He watched the thin plume of steam and thought of the way Willow had said thank you yesterday, as if the words cost her something and she still paid. He set the cup aside without tasting it, and the untouched bitterness felt like its own small verdict.
By the time he reached the hospital, the corridor had finished its night molt into day. Midnight's charged hush had been replaced by soft sole traffic, rolling carts, nurses trading quick updates at the station, a muted television in a room where no one was watching. The air smelled like sanitizer and overheated coffee, and the whole place moved with the practiced efficiency of people who could not afford to pause.
He checked in, signed what they put in front of him, and accepted the discharge packet without letting his expression change. It was paperwork, signatures, liability language, the kind of order that hospitals used to pretend they controlled outcomes. He listened to Kara's quick rundown from the edge of the station, nodded at the parts that mattered, and kept his questions short.
Then he walked down the corridor toward Willow's room.
He stopped at the doorway and did not step inside right away.
For a full minute he watched her without interrupting the moment she was in.
She sat by the window in a chair someone had dragged close to the light. Not the bed. Not the door. The window, as if it was the only thing in the room that did not ask her to perform. The sling held her arm tight against her ribs, and the white wrap around her wrist and forearm looked too clean for what she had lived through. Her clothes were hospital gift shop clothes, not soft, not stylish, just practical: a plain gray sweatshirt with the hospital logo printed small near the hem, black sweatpants that still had a faint fold line like they had been pulled from plastic an hour ago, and a pair of cheap socks with little rubber grips on the soles. Her hair was twisted into a quick knot at the nape, uneven and stubborn, as if she had done it one handed in the bathroom mirror and refused to redo it.
No one had brought her a change of clothes. No one had thought far enough ahead to bring toiletries. Her original outfit had been ruined in the crash, and she had solved the problem herself the way she always did. Get what you need. Pay for it. Move on.
It should have looked small.
It did not.
The sunlight found her cheekbone and stayed there, turning her profile sharp and distant. Her gaze was set beyond the glass, focused on something outside that did not include him, the nurses, the lies, or the tidy story Miles wanted everyone to swallow. Her mouth was relaxed, but not soft. The expression was not peace. It was control.
Zane felt a quiet shift in his chest, something between respect and discomfort, because he recognized the type of woman who could keep moving even when everything had been stripped down to the bare minimum. He also recognized the fact that she had been left to do it alone.
He stepped in only after he had steadied his face into neutrality.
"Ready?" he asked, keeping his voice even from the threshold.
Her eyes slid to him. "For what, freedom," she said, "or the next act in the play?"
His mouth tightened. Did she mean life, or did she see the seam. Prudence said let it pass.
"The nurse will bring papers," he said. "I'll take you home."
Something moved behind her expression, confusion, a flicker of disbelief, a flint spark of wary gratitude. It was there and gone fast, like a match struck and hidden. She looked away first, not because she could not hold his gaze, but because she chose not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her unguarded for too long.
Kara arrived with a clipboard and a pen, brisk and kind in the way nurses had to be.
"Sign here, sweetie," she said. "And here, and this one means you promise to read the pamphlet about dizziness even though nobody ever does."
Willow's signature was elegant and controlled, the same loop each time. Contracts, releases, goodbyes, it did not matter. The line she made through paper refused to shake.
"Wheelchair?" Kara offered, already half expecting the answer.
"No." Willow's smile was polite, final. "I've sat enough."
Kara's glance flicked to Zane, making him complicit in the decision. Zane gave the smallest nod, the kind that said he would not argue but he would catch her if she swayed. He lifted the bag before Willow could reach and held out his arm without making it a question.
The look he gave her was not permission. It was presence.
She took his arm with her good one, and her grip was careful, controlled, as if she hated needing anything from anyone even when her body insisted.
They took the elevator in silence. Between floors, the machine hummed their breathing back to them, and the quiet felt organized rather than empty. When the doors parted, the lobby noise rushed in, rolling carts, someone arguing with a vending machine, a toddler's sudden delighted squeal that made the building feel briefly less harsh.
Outside, the sun cut the parking lot into bright planes. His car glinted like a knife laid flat. It was black and sleek, every line deliberate, the kind of car that did not just move, it announced.
She paused, head tilting. "Nice taste," she said, threading lightness through the words like a thin ribbon she could pull away if she needed to.
"It gets me places," he replied, thumb sparking the locks.
The MC20's door lifted with a quiet, precise sigh. Inside: stitched leather, cool carbon fiber, the faint clean scent that had become his signature, soap, cedar, something colder. He steadied the door, and when she angled her arm through the space, he moved closer without touching. The sling complicated everything; pain did the rest. Her breath snagged.
"I'm fine," she said, and flinched at the belt's first tug.
He leaned in.
Proximity changed the air. The heat of him, the line of his shoulder, the gravity of his focus, everything inside the cabin considered rearranging. She looked up, straight into his eyes, and the reaction she did not want hit fast. Not fear. Not softness. A sudden awareness that made her heart pick up like it had been startled, a deep thud that surprised her because she was supposed to be in control of this plan, this revenge, this narrative. Yesterday's kiss flashed in her memory with unwelcome clarity, and the heat of it pressed right up against the cold logic she had been relying on.
Color rose in her cheeks, sudden and traitorous, and it added another layer she had not believed Zane possessed. Attention. The kind that learns you.
He took the belt, guided it cleanly to the latch, eased the webbing so it did not cut the sling. He was careful in a way that never felt performative. It felt practiced, as if he had trained himself to be near without bruising anything.
"There," he said, voice low, even, then stepped back with surgical precision as if distance was part of the job.
He circled, got in, and tapped the screen. "Type your address," he said, not a command so much as the next thing happening.
Her fingers hovered a fraction too long. Then she entered it.
He started the engine, and the Maserati woke with a restrained growl that seemed to settle behind her sternum. He guided them onto the road, and the car did what it was built to do. It took intention and translated it into motion so smoothly it almost felt like cheating. The city slid past in soft layers that pretended to be ordinary. A laundromat's neon OPEN sign blinked awake like a tired eye. A baker dusted flour across a counter in the window, shoulders already resigned to the day. A woman walked a small dog in a sweater that made it look like regret had learned how to beg.
Zane drove the way he did everything else, with no waste. No sharp accelerations to show off, no unnecessary braking, no little proofs of ego. His hands stayed quiet on the wheel, steady at the same angles as if the steering column belonged to him. Willow watched his fingers first, then the line of his profile, and felt that familiar irritation rise again. He was not movie handsome. He was something else, something built for attention and discipline. His focus had a shape, and he wore it like a precision tool.
She turned her face toward the window to keep herself from staring. Flowering trees spilled mild pink over the curb like dropped silk. On a corner, a man arranged knotted ropes of garlic with the careful rhythm of someone making an offering. A city bus yawned at a stoplight and shuddered forward again. Everything outside behaved like it had never heard of her pain, and she hated how normal that felt.
Her street came up too quickly. The car took a narrow lane beneath a lacework of branches and braked in front of a white stone building with ivy curling up its side. Her name sat on the mailbox in faded gold, familiar and slightly sad. The building looked smaller than she remembered, or maybe she was bigger now in all the wrong ways, heavy with what she knew, heavy with what she planned.
Cool morning air carried damp earth and jasmine when Zane opened her door. He did not offer his arm. He offered presence, which was somehow worse, because it let her decide what to do with him.
"Careful," he said.
"You really think I'll shatter?" The brittle edge in her voice surprised them both, and for a second she hated herself for letting it show.
He did not answer. He held the door, then the discharge bag, then the quiet itself, as if silence was another thing he could manage properly. On the short steps, her breath hitched once when her ribs pulled around the sling. He did not comment, and that restraint felt like its own kind of intimacy.
Her keys were buried at the bottom of the cheap hospital tote she had been given. She knew exactly where they were without looking, but her fingers stiffened when she tried to dig for them with one hand. Pain flickered across her face before she could stop it.
Zane unzipped the bag.
"What are you doing?"
"Helping."
"I didn't ask."
"You will," he said, not unkindly. He found the key and turned it, and the lock surrendered as if it had been waiting for him. "I don't wait for instructions."
The words should not have sounded like a warning. They did anyway, and she made a mental note of it as she stepped inside.
Her apartment exhaled when the door opened, that soft release of a space that has been alone and is suddenly not. Books lined one wall in double rows, some upright, some stacked, their spines worn in the places her hands had touched most. A faded rug held the room together like a promise. The cream sofa carried the dents of a real life lived on it, not staged. A chipped mug on the coffee table held three pens and a pair of scissors with tape stuck to one blade. The air smelled like lavender sachets and the memory of tea. It was not grand. It was hers, and she felt an odd flare of possessiveness as he crossed the threshold.
He paused for the briefest beat, as if asking the room's permission, then moved to the table and set the bag where it made sense. He did not move like a visitor. He moved like someone careful not to rearrange gravity.
"You should sit," he said.
"You really take orders well for someone who hates them."
"I didn't say I take them," he replied, glancing up just long enough for the words to land. "I said I follow what makes sense."
She lowered herself onto the sofa with controlled care, keeping her injured arm tight and protected. Then she took stock of him in her space, tall and dark against the smallness, out of place and inevitable at the same time. Useful men had that talent. They could fit anywhere if you let them.
"You want tea?" she asked, because her mouth wanted something neutral to do.
"I'll make it," he said. "For both of us."
She expected a quip. She expected a deflection. What she got was competence that looked like it had been practiced.
He found the kettle without asking, ran the water until it went cold, filled it, and set it on the stove. He lit the burner with a match, the kind of motion that suggested he grew up around gas flames and parents who cared about bills. He opened the cupboard and, with one look, found what he needed. Jasmine. A tin with a foreign label, something black and serious. Two mugs sat side by side. One green. One black. He chose without pausing, as if the choice had been made the moment he saw them.
Steam climbed while the leaves sank and bloomed, and he carried both cups back with the same calm he used for everything else. He set hers on the side table within easy reach of her right hand, then took the chair opposite and left the sofa between them like a border they had both agreed to honor.
"Milk?" he asked.
She nodded, and watched him pour with a steadiness that made even this simple thing look like care. The color changed slowly, and the scent of jasmine rose into the room and laid itself against the lavender like two gentle animals trading warmth. Zane looked wrong and right here. Tailored edges in a room that preferred soft corners, a man built for glass-walled offices holding a ceramic mug like he had been handed something alive.
"Thank you," she said, and the words came out before she could decide if she wanted them to.
"You've said that before."
"I seem to mean it more this time."
The corner of his mouth gave, a small shift that would have looked like nothing to anyone who did not know how tightly he held himself. "Good."
She stared into her tea as if it might answer the things she would not say aloud. Outside, a neighbor's bicycle clicked twice where it leaned against the rail. Somewhere in the building, a door opened and shut. The world insisted on small sounds, and they took up space in the quiet between them.
"You don't have to stay," she said finally, because control demanded she say it.
"I know," he answered, letting the first honesty land without dressing it up. Then his voice softened, almost aimed at his cup instead of her. "I want to."
She looked away because it was safer. The thin curtain stirred in the current from the vent, and she watched it move as if it was more interesting than his words. The ease of him in her space was the dangerous part, the way he moved as if ease is what people owe each other when pain tries to make a meal of them.
"There are prescriptions in the bag," he said, and stood. "I'll put them on the counter. You can tell me where you keep your pills, or I can guess."
"You'll guess right anyway," she said, because he would.
He set the pharmacy sack on the counter, scanned the labels, slid a glass toward the sink with the heel of his hand like he had been in her kitchen a hundred times. Willow watched him and felt something she did not want. Not trust. Not safety. Something worse. Familiarity trying to root itself where it did not belong.
She put a fingertip to the rim of her mug and traced the circle, buying herself a second to choose the right tone. "Zane," she said, without inflection.
He turned at the sound of his name the way people do when they are new to hearing it from the person they want to hear it from, and that detail annoyed her more than it should have.
"You kissed me yesterday," she said. Not accusation. Inventory.
"Yes," he replied, as if there was no point pretending otherwise.
"Why?"
He considered lying. She saw it in the tiny reset of his shoulders, the way his jaw tightened before he released it. Then he gave her the smallest truth that would not break the room. "Because I wanted to," he said, and did not apologize for it. "And because you leaned two millimeters closer."
She held absolutely still, not because she was shocked, but because she hated that he had noticed. People did not notice her like that unless they had an agenda or a heart. Sometimes both. It added to layers she did not believe Zane possessed, and the awareness unsettled her more than the kiss itself.
"I don't remember that," she said, keeping the performance smooth.
"I know," he answered, and the calm certainty in his voice made the lie feel strangely heavy.
For a while after that, they were just two people drinking tea in the morning, cataloging each other through steam. Outside, a delivery truck hissed to a stop and then protested leaving. Upstairs, someone's radio found the tail end of a ballad and cut it short. The apartment clock ticked like it was counting down to something.
Willow could feel the gears of her plan notched and ready, and still the quiet insisted on tenderness. That was the annoying thing about quiet. It had an opinion.
He broke it first, because he always did. "I'll come back later," he said, starting the sentence like a question he expected her to finish. "If you need anything."
"I'll be okay," she replied, and made sure it sounded believable.
His eyes warmed a degree and then cooled again, like metal acknowledging heat and returning to form. "All right," he said, and she could hear the effort in how normal he tried to make it.
She watched him set his cup down and stand. He did not check his phone. He did not fill the space with words. He crossed to the door and paused with his hand on the knob, then turned back as if he had decided something practical, which was his favorite kind of decision.
"Tell me where you keep the spare key," he said.
She arched a brow. "That's bold."
"It's practical," he replied. "If your arm rebels, I'm not making you buzz me from the sidewalk."
She considered the risk and the leverage at the same time, because she was good at holding two truths in one hand. Then she gave him the answer. "Top book on the third stack," she said. "Hollowed out. I don't keep anything inside."
He went to the stack, lifted the battered hardcover with half its dust jacket gone, found the key, and memorized the feel of it without pocketing it. Then he put it back with exact spine to exact space, as if the room would notice if he failed.
"I'll knock anyway," he said.
She did not answer. He had given a time horizon to a lie, and the horizon looked like patience instead of conquest. That unsettled her in the places plot does not reach.
He opened the door, and jasmine from the hallway slipped in for a second, mixing with the lavender in her apartment. His aftershave drifted with it. He looked back once, not to check on her, but as if to fix her into a coordinate system he could navigate by later.
He left the way he did everything else, without waste. The door closed with that soft apartment hush, the sound of two cards pressed together and then released.
Willow sat very still. The tea cooled between her hands. Her apartment laid its familiar shadows back over her. The jasmine in the curtain breathed. The clock remembered how to tick.
She told herself the ride had been competence. The tea had been logistics. The kiss had been a lapse dressed up as care. Men like Zane worship at the altar of control, and when control stutters, they rename it decency.
Fine. She could work with that.
She rose and crossed to the window, the sling an accusation against her ribs, and watched the street reassemble into normal. Down there, people did not care who had rewritten whom. Up here, she would.
Zane was not a refuge. He was leverage with a jawline. He believed the amnesia. He had built himself a quiet, useful fantasy, predictable, measured, almost noble. It made him the safest kind of collateral, the kind that would apologize while he held the door open to his own undoing.
Miles first. Always Miles. But every structure needs load-bearing points. Zane could be one. Encourage the interactions. Let him be decent. Let him schedule "check-ins," carry bags, pour tea, say text me and mean it. Let Christy hear about it third-hand. Let Miles hear about it in a silence he can't name. Give the lie a pulse and call it recovery.
If they wanted a story, she'd give them a better one—one that ended in regret. She pictured it: Christy's smile going brittle at brunch; Miles's careful composure cracking the first time he saw Zane reach for the apartment keypad like it belonged to him; Zane, principled, exact, discovering too late that he'd been part of the instrument, not the melody. None of it required theatrics. Only proximity. Repetition. The rumor of ease. Tenderness wasn't surrender. It was bait. Her phone buzzed on the table.
Text me if you remember a thing I've forgotten to do. Signed Z. He thought that sentence was restraint. It was an opening. Willow picked up the phone and considered all the ways help could look harmless. Something small. Believable.
The kind of errand that plants a flag without looking like one. Could use a charger. Left mine at the hospital, she typed. Then paused, added: If you're nearby. No rush. Not a hook. A handhold. The dots appeared, vanished, returned, proof that even Zane Reyes revised his impulses. I'll bring one. 30 minutes. A beat. I'll get food. Thai?
She set the phone down and let a smile ghost across her mouth, thin and deliberate, a muscle trained to lie. Step one, Plan A: repeat contact until "us" sounded like habit. Let proximity do what confession never could. All she wanted now was an opportunity. The lock clicked softly when she turned it, the spare key's place fresh in her mind. She opened the curtains wider, coaxed the room into a version of warmth that read on sight. Flowers to the sill. Cups rinsed and set within reach. A clean shape for a narrative to walk into.
The street below carried on, a courier on a bike; a woman tugging a stubborn dog; a car idling, then moving. Somewhere under that hum, the Maserati's restrained animal sound would return. She closed her eyes, inhaled jasmine and the faint ghost of his aftershave, and counted backward from ten until the anger cooled into something useful. Something had shifted.