I could end this conversation right now, and let him off the hook, and never hear for certain what he was about to say. If I did that, we could continue on. We could keep muddling through, trying to patch things up. I could chalk everything we’d said or done up to “the tragedy” and forgive it all and stay focused on my impossible odds.

I could so easily take that route. It was wildly tempting.

But I didn’t. “Chip. What happened?”

He kept his eyes on the bedspread and shook his head.

“Chip,” I said, more pressure in my voice. “Tell me.”

He held very still.

“Tell me!”

Then he did tell me. But he closed his eyes first. “I slept with someone.”

*

I HADN’T BEEN wrong. I knew that’s where he was headed. But the words, once they were spoken, meant the end. They severed us. That was it. He’d made a choice, but I’d made a choice, too. I’m sure I felt many things at that moment, but the only one I remember is loneliness.

“Who?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does fucking matter.”

Chip stood up then—too fast—and knocked his chair over. It clattered to the floor. He didn’t pick it up, just paced around the foot of the bed. “Tara,” he admitted at last.

“Your old girlfriend, Tara? The one you call the Whiner?”

He nodded.

“You don’t even like her!”

“I know.”

I didn’t even know where to start. “Chip.” It was more of a sigh than a word.

“She saw my post about you on Facebook, and she got in touch. She started coming by to check on me. She brought soup.”

“She brought soup?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t eating. She was concerned. And then one thing led to another.”

“Don’t tell me.” I felt it like a gasp: I didn’t want to know.

But now I’d gotten him going. “She came by one night and found me crying—”

“Am I supposed to pity you?”

“—and I just couldn’t pull it together. And so she just kind of put her arms around me—”

“Stop.”

“—and kind of cradled me—“

“Chip. Shut it down.”

“—and the next thing I knew, we were kissing—”

“Stop! I’m fucking serious! Stop!” I didn’t realize how loud I was shouting.

Right then, the door to my room pushed open, and Ian walked in.

He eyed Chip for a second before turning to me. “Everything all right?”

“Get the hell out, man,” Chip said. “We’re talking.”

Ian kept his eyes on me. “I wasn’t asking you, prick.”

I looked up at Ian. He was motionless with suppressed tension. I knew in an instant my dad had been right, that the acoustics between my room and the hallway went both ways. I could hear them out there perfectly—and they could hear me just as well in here.

Ian had just witnessed this whole, humiliating, life-crushing conversation. Enough of it, anyway.

“Can I do anything for you?” Ian asked me then, his voice as tender as I’d ever heard it. “Get you a glass of water? Beat the crap out of this wanker?”

I gave a microscopic smile, but Ian caught it.

I shook my head.

“Can we finish our conversation, please?” Chip asked, though I couldn’t tell if he was asking me or Ian.

“Maggie?” Ian said, never shifting his gaze from mine. “Is this a conversation you’d like to continue?”

I shook my head again. “I think we’re done.”

“That’s it, prick. Beat it.”

But Chip wasn’t ready to go. “Margaret—”

In a flash, Ian was right up next to him, looming a good six inches above. “You heard her. Get out.”

Chip put his hands up and backed away. “Okay.” He took several steps back, without turning, seeming to consider his options, and then, because he really didn’t have any, he turned to leave.

Just as he did, I called, “Chip! Wait!”

He turned back, and I pulled off his grandmother’s engagement ring and threw it at him with all the force I could muster.

He ducked, and I missed.

The ring bounced off the wall and then skittered under the empty bed next to mine—so Chip had to get down on his hands and knees to crawl after it. It was just enough humiliation to give me a twinge of satisfaction.

But only a twinge.

*

AS SOON AS he was gone, the fog closed back in.

It was like suffocating in plain air.

I started panting, but in deep, swooping breaths, pushing them out and then sucking them back in. For a second, I couldn’t see. The room didn’t go black—it went white. It blurred out of focus until there was nothing.

Except Ian’s voice. Ian was still there. “Slow it down,” he said, near my ear. “Take it slow. Count to four going out. That’s it. Now four going in. Good.”

As my breathing slowed, the world came back, and I felt Ian’s hand on my forehead, stroking my hair. I opened my eyes, and there was his face, just a few inches away.

“You’re all right,” he said. “You’re okay.”

“Ian,” I said next, when it felt safe to speak. “I need you to do me a favor.”

“Anything,” he said. “Of course.”

“I really, really need you,” I said, “to get me the hell out of here.”

Sixteen

IAN STOOD UP and evaluated me for a minute. Then he reached over to pull back my covers.

“Right,” he said. “Scoot to the edge of the bed.”

I dangled my legs over, and he bent down in front of me and backed up. “Climb on.”

“What? On you? Like a piggyback ride?”

He nodded. “Pretend I’m a horse.”

“A Clydesdale, maybe.”

“Move it, lass. Make it happen. Squeeze with your thighs.”

The good news was, I could do that. My thighs worked just fine. It was everything below them that didn’t. I leaned forward until my chest fell against his back, and then I wriggled my legs into position around his waist. I wrapped my arms around his neck.

“Not a choke hold, though,” he instructed. “Low, on the collarbones.” He moved my hands down.

He stood up. “Is this okay?”

A piggyback ride. When was the last time I’d had one of those? “Yes.”

“We’re not touching your donor sites? Or pulling on your grafts?”

“I’m good. I should travel like this more often.”

He pulled the quilt off my bed and grabbed a pillow, and then he walked us out past the nurses’ station—where every single person stopped what they were doing to gape at us going by. As we passed, without even slowing down, he grabbed a bag of Milano cookies off the reception desk.

He took long steps and moved fast. He really was a Clydesdale. He didn’t walk, he strode. I hadn’t moved that quickly through any space in weeks, and despite everything, it gave me a tickle of a thrill in my stomach. I felt an odd urge to laugh, but I held it back.

He walked us to the elevator, and we rode up to the top floor, then got off and strode to the end of a corridor, directly toward a door with a push handle that said NOT AN EXIT—ALARM WILL SOUND.

“Hey—that’s not an exit,” I said, as we barreled toward it. “Hey! ‘Alarm will sound’!”

We burst through the door anyway, though. No alarm sounded.

“It’s disabled,” he explained, as the door swung closed behind us. “It’s where the nurses go to smoke.”

Then we were outside. I caught my breath. It was a crisp, clear March evening—with the most stunning orange and purple sunset I’d ever seen. Or so it seemed. It would have been breathtaking in any situation, but I literally had not been outside since the night of the accident. How long had that been? We were ending my second week in the inpatient wing, and I’d spent a week in the ICU before that, so: three solid weeks without seeing the sky, or feeling the breeze, or breathing fresh air. No wonder I was feeling so crazy.

That, and everything else.

Ian took us across the roof to the far edge, which had a view of downtown Austin and the capitol building. With me still on his back, he laid the blanket out flat and dropped the pillow and the cookies. Then he got down on his hands and knees and backed up to the blanket like a dump truck and tilted up so I could slide down onto my knees. The whole thing gave me just a smidge of vertigo, and I rolled onto my side in the middle of the quilt. He brought the pillow around to prop me correctly so I could lie back to see the sky without damaging my grafts.

The sky. The wind blew across me and fluttered my hair back. I felt a little cold, but it was okay. It made me aware of all my edges—where I stopped and the rest of the world continued. I was still alive, I thought then. It hit me out on that roof for the first time.

I was alive.

In the next second, I felt Ian lay his fleece sweatshirt over me, and then he flopped down beside me and got settled on his back. Then he lifted a cookie up into my field of vision, and I reached up and grabbed it.

Nobody spoke, and for the first time ever—maybe in my entire life—that was okay. We listened to the wind, and the muted traffic ten stories below, and the crunch of cookies as we chewed. We watched the sky darken as the sun sank out of view. So much of life is just grinding through. So many moments just exist to deliver you to the ones that follow. But this moment was a destination in itself.