Those were the qualities they respected, the qualities they had wished their son had married instead of me, the qualities that had made them roll their eyes at the dull wife at home.
And those same qualities, in Carys, had come within an hour of killing him.
Meanwhile the thing they had despised in me — the seriousness, the quiet, the refusal to perform — turned out to be the only thing standing between their son and a mortuary drawer.
They were not just embarrassed.
They were confronting the possibility that their entire instinct for who mattered and who didn’t, the instinct they had trusted their whole lives and applied to me every single day for six years, was not merely unkind but dangerous — that it had led them to disdain the person who saved their son and champion the one who nearly ended him.
That is a hard thing to sit with in a hospital chair at dawn.