“You can be honest with me.” He looked over at her. “I know it’s not going to be easy.”

“First of all, I wouldn’t disrespect you by not telling you the truth or by shading things. And secondly, I don’t tend to focus on the end. What I try to have people get in tune with is the right now. I acknowledge to my patients that their bodies are failing and there is nothing we can do to stop that. But then I ask them, what do you want to most preserve about yourself right now? What characteristics of yours are most important to you? How can we honor them? Bring them forward? Who do you need to see? Who do you want to see? The reality is that the dying are still living just as everyone who is living is in the process of dying. Does this make sense?”

He nodded and closed his eyes.

It was heartbreaking to note that he seemed to have aged a hundred years in the last twenty-four hours.

And it was so hard for her not to break down and weep—except she couldn’t do that in front of him. She might not have known Silas long in terms of calendar days, but she was well-familiar with his character, and if he saw her carrying on over him, he would waste energy trying to comfort her.

Staring at the dark shadow of his lashes on his pale cheekbones, she was convinced that the Scribe Virgin had put the two of them together on purpose: He had needed someone to help him on his journey to the Fade…and she had needed to feel love.

As much as she hated to admit it, underneath her hard, I’m-not-a-romantic-like-Rubes exterior, there had been a lonely place. A quiet, lonely place that hadn’t trusted fate was going to provide her with anything more than a nightly grind.

Of course, what it had given her was a double-edged sword, wasn’t it.

“I have lived for a long time.” Silas’s voice was reedy and he took a couple of breaths. “I have seen many things. Much has changed over the last four centuries. I have known good people and bad ones, done things of which I am proud and others that I regret. I guess I am no different than anyone else.”

“What do you most want to be remembered for?” she whispered.

His lids lifted and his eyes shifted to her own.

“My love for you.” He blinked slowly. “I wish to be best remembered for how much I loved you. Of all the places I’ve gone and people I’ve known and things I’ve done…my love for you is the purest representation of who I am. It’s the best of me, of who I am, of my soul. My love for you…is everything of me.”

Ivie teared up even though she did her best not to give in to emotion. “Silas…”

“Please don’t forget me. I know I’m probably supposed to tell you to move on with your life and dwell on this little slice of time we’ve been given…but just…take me in your heart wherever you go. It will be the life I wished I’d lived, by your side, enjoying the gift of time and health with you.”

“I promise,” she breathed. “I will never, ever forget you.”

When he didn’t respond, Ivie took his palm and placed it over her heart. “Here. You will be here.”

“I’ll try to come back to you,” he mumbled. “In your dreams…I’ll come find you…in your dreams…love…you…dearest…Ivie…”

All at once, the monitoring equipment behind the bed started to go off, multiple alarms sounding out and summoning help.

As Rubes and three other nurses burst through the staff door, Ivie jumped up to her knees and did a quick assessment. Cardiac arrest. His heart wasn’t beating.

“Flatten the bed!” she barked out. “Give me a flat bed!”

For a split second the other staff members, and her cousin, froze. But then everyone snapped into action, Ivie checking Silas’s airway and then leaning over him so she could provide chest compressions.

“Where’s the crash cart?” she yelled as she locked her elbows and began punching into his chest. “We’re going to need the paddles! Silas! Stay with me—don’t go yet, you gotta stay with…”

* * *

—

By three a.m., Silas appeared to have stabilized—which was the good news. The bad news? He had not regained consciousness and had had to be ventilated so that he would keep breathing.

His poor heart had been so ravaged by his out-of-control immune system that the muscle was just not up to its work load anymore. At the moment, the only thing that was keeping it going was a complex, layer-upon-layer combination of medications—and the blood that she’d managed to get down the back of his throat about two hours ago.

But this was not a long-term solution and everybody knew it.

Havers had been in surgery and then attending a complicated birth, so at this point, they were just waiting for his final assessment of what every one of the nurses, including Ivie herself, knew to be true.

Silas was, for all intents and purposes, already gone.

Only the shell remained, the failing husk.

Ivie sat down on the edge of the bed and took his flaccid hand. “I love you, Silas. I’m so glad I met you.”

She didn’t fight the tears this time, even though she did believe that patients in comas were more aware of their surroundings than their level of consciousness suggested.

How were they saying goodbye so soon—

“Ivie?”

At the soft prompting, she looked up. Rubes was standing on the other side of the bed, the female’s hands tangled in front of her chest, her body tilted forward, as if she were trying to interrupt as quietly as she could.

Ivie mopped up her face with her palms and tried to smile. “Hi there. How’s it going, cuz?”

Or something to that effect. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was saying.

“There’s someone here who’d like to see you?”

“Okay. Sure. All right.”

It didn’t dawn on her to ask who. Then again, she didn’t really care about anything except what was happening on the hospital bed.

“Where?”

“Out in the hall.”

As Rubes nodded toward the front of the suite, Ivie stood up and brushed the loose tears off her uniform. Then she put one foot in front of another through the archway and the sitting room, and out into the hall—

She stopped dead.

“I thought you needed an oak of your own right now,” Rubes said gently from behind.

Ivie’s father was standing in the middle of the corridor, those biker boots planted on the fancy runner, his hands on his leather-clad hips, his tattoos gleaming in the low lighting because, of course, he had come without a jacket on.

Ivie squeezed her cousin’s hand in thanks and then she ran for her sire.

She hit Hirah like a car going out of control at full speed. And like a concrete pylon, her father didn’t budge. He just put his heavy arms around her and held her tight.

“He’s dying, Daddy. He’s dying…”

Her father didn’t say a thing. He let his strength do the talking as he kept her from collapsing in a heap in the hall.

“I love him so much,” she turned her face to the side and squeezed her eyes tight. “And he’s dying…”

They stayed like that for the longest time, and she was dimly aware of people shuffling by quietly, but she didn’t pay any attention to that.

And later, much later, she would reflect that it was then that she became an adult. Standing in that corridor, in her father’s embrace, she fully came into her maturity.

The thing was, when you were young, and you went to your parents for support, nine times out of ten, they could fix whatever was wrong. They could glue the broken rudder back on your sailboat. Throw a Band-Aid on a cut. Feed you when you were hungry, put you to bed when you were exhausted, hang out with you when you were alone. They could help you find what was lost, make the storms go away, buy you an ice cream when someone was mean to you for no good reason.

Parents, when you were a child, were the source of it’s-gonna-be-all-right.

But as Ivie leaned on her dad, it was as an adult.

He couldn’t fix this, and she knew better than to even ask.

“I’m so sorry, little girl,” he said in a voice that cracked. “I’m so sorry…”