“Your work. Everything you built. I couldn’t be the thing that took it down.”

“Gabrielle.” He said my name like it hurt. “Without you and the girls, that house went back to being an empty tomb. That’s all it ever was before you. You didn’t take anything from me. You were the only thing in it worth keeping.”

And he pulled me into his arms, in the middle of that hospital ward, and I stopped pretending — to him, and to myself — that this had ever only been a shield.

Chapter 13 — What He Said to the Cameras

Holly’s surgery was set for the next morning, and Bruce covered every cent of it through one of his hospital’s emergency funds before anyone could even finish explaining the numbers to me.

That evening, reporters found his car in the hospital lot, and by the time the sun went down there was a crowd of them at the entrance, cameras and microphones and shouted questions.

Bruce looked at them through the glass doors for a long moment.