Blake and Danielle had made one enormous miscalculation, and it was the same miscalculation that arrogant people always make about the quiet, steady ones, and it undid them completely.

They had looked at my life — the twelve-hour trauma shifts, the exhaustion, the nights away, the way I came home too tired to talk — and they had concluded that I was weak.

Isolated.

Distracted.

Easy.

They had assumed that a woman worn thin by saving other people’s lives in emergency rooms would be too depleted to notice betrayal happening in her own house, and too soft, when she finally did notice, to do anything but cry about it.

They had never once understood what a trauma nurse actually is.