“She’s got a long, painful recovery ahead of her,” he whispered.

“Accidents happen in hospitals all the time.” And there it was, the second half of it, recorded as clearly as the first: a direct threat against my wife’s life, in a hospital, delivered by the man who had already put her in the bed.

I looked at him, and I held his eyes until his smirk finally faltered and slid off his face, and I said only two words.

“Get out.” And Trent Prescott walked out of that room believing, right up to the end, that he had successfully intimidated me — that he had come, and threatened, and won.