The door clicked shut behind me, and she turned her head at the sound.

When she saw it was me, her eyes went wide, and every drop of remaining color left her face.

I had rehearsed, on the drive over, a hundred versions of what I’d say when I saw her.

Every one of them evaporated the instant I stepped into that room.

Because the woman in the bed wasn’t the ex-wife I’d spent six months filing away as a chapter that had closed.

She was just Rosalie — the person I’d known better than anyone alive, the person whose face I could have drawn from memory in the dark — and she was pale and depleted and had just fought her way alone through something that should have had two people in the room, and the sight of her hollowed me out.