“It doesn’t explain why you walked out on me in the first place.

She didn’t make you leave, Alex.

You did that yourself, before she ever intercepted a thing.” And before she left, she pulled out her phone and showed him a single photograph, six years old: four impossibly tiny infants, each in a separate incubator, each hooked to a tangle of monitors and tubes, fighting, at thirty-two weeks, simply to breathe.

“You lost years, Alex,” Elena said quietly, gathering her coat.

“I survived them.