She'd let him hold her earlier. For those minutes while she'd fallen apart, she'd turned into him and accepted comfort from him and he had felt the ghost of every version of their relationship, what they'd been to each other before everything collapsed, what they might have been if different choices had been made, what they perhaps still were beneath all the accumulated damage.
He was not naive enough to build a structure on that. But he was not so armored that he could pretend it had meant nothing.
"She's going to be furious with us," Mei said quietly, not looking up.
"What?"
"When she wakes up. She's going to see how we've all been sitting here and she's going to feel guilty about it. She'll say we shouldn't have worried, that she had it handled." A faint, exhausted smile crossed Mei's face. "She'll probably apologize to the doctors for the inconvenience."
Despite everything, Alexander felt something loosen fractionally in his chest. "She sounds insufferable."
