“I’m pregnant,” Lexie blurted the moment Emma set down margaritas.

I gaped at her, only half surprised, remembering the moment in the shoe store when she rubbed her stomach. I’d had an inkling then.

Emma was full-on surprised.

She did not react in the way I imagined a best girl friend would react.

But then, Emma did not react in a way that anyone imagined. It was kind of her thing.

“Now? You had to announce this now?” she snapped. “Why couldn’t you be pregnant after we all get sloshed on margaritas? Now I have to wait nine months for you to get sloshed on margaritas. Probably more if you breastfeed.” She pointed at her. “Don’t breastfeed.”

Lexie grinned up at her, not at all perturbed by her friend’s unconventional response to her happy news.

“It’s not going to be nine, more like six months,” she corrected, cupping her still-flat stomach. “We wanted to wait.”

I got why. Because they were bracing. Her and Killian both. Even though they’d both endured about a hundred times more heartbreak than any human deserved, and finally got that happiness, they were cautious. Expecting something to tear through it and destroy it all over again.

I reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’m so happy for you, Lexie,” I breathed. It didn’t escape me that I sounded the same way Meredith had that day in the grocery store.

Lexie smiled back at me, not saying anything. Not needing to. She just squeezed my hand back.

Emma was not smiling. She was glaring at Lexie. Or more precisely, Lexie’s stomach.

“Of course,” she snapped. “Of course you’re three months along and skinnier than me after eating half a cheesecake.”

She then gave Lexie another look. A longer one. No words. Like the visual version of the hand squeeze Lexie had just given me.

No words necessary.

They shared that look long enough for Emma to say everything she needed to without actually having to say it.

Then she stomped back to her small but nice kitchen.

Her apartment was a much smaller version of Sam and Wyatt’s mansion. Tastefully and expensive decorated. Small, without personal touches apart from a framed photo of her and Lexie on the coffee table in front of me.

“I always keep a bottle of champagne in the fridge,” Emma explained, opening her fridge to reveal a couple of rogue condiments and a flickering bulb in need of changing. She paused, her arm halfway into the empty chasm that would not be so in my house.

I always had condiments, of course, but a lot more than that, and a lot of various types of food to put with them. I glanced at the outstretched, tanned and tattooed arm. The muscles of her bicep were smooth and defined, not an inch of fat, not even that jiggly bit underneath.

“In case of emergencies,” she continued, yanking out a very expensive-looking bottle of champagne. She lifted it with a grin. “Or Tuesdays.” She set it down and began the process of opening it. “And now we get to use it for its intended purpose.” She beamed at Lexie. “Celebration.”

Lexie beamed back. “Babe, I appreciate this, you.” Her eyes moved to me. “And I appreciate you,” she whispered. “More than you know. You’ve made one of my favorite people in the entire world happy. Actually happy. And though he’s the one who looks the happiest of us all, he was the most miserable. Until you.”

I blinked away my tears at her words, what she’d offered so freely. “The same goes for me,” I admitted. Sam had given me not just him and his love, but the opportunity to grasp on to everything that I’d been depriving myself of. The friends I’d been distancing myself from because of their proximity to him. Sam didn’t complete my life though, as much as I’d love for that to be the case.

It was good that wasn’t the case.

One person was not meant to complete another person.

Despite whatever romance novels said.

Which was maybe so many romance novels ended in death.

Because they portrayed love that burned too bright, too fast. That didn’t let anything else exist but love. And concentrated love, like pure alcohol, would kill you if continually consumed without something else. Without the mixer.

Girlfriends were the mixer. You needed them, to survive this life. And Sam gave me that too, without even knowing it.

I’d been only half living before. Between the pages. And I needed a man who loved me to sleep next to at night.

But I also needed girls’ night.

“He makes me laugh. And he makes me cry.”

Emma’s eyes twinkled. Danced with love. Too much of it. And too many more swigs of it might kill her.

“Only men who can make you laugh so beautifully can make you cry so painfully,” she said. “Just like the ones who love you the hardest can hurt you the most. Destroy you, more accurately. It’s life’s little Catch-22, and it’s a fucker.”

The room descended into silence, the weight of Emma’s words settling on us despite the fact that we were happy.

Maybe it was because we were happy. And because we knew that we were with the people who were going to guarantee our infinite happiness. And our infinite destruction.

Emma shook herself out of it.

“Enough of that,” she declared, pouring three glasses. “We’re celebrating.”

I took mine from her.

Lexie did not. “Dude, you cannot celebrate a pregnancy announcement with a glass of alcohol.”

Emma looked at her, then to the glass she had outstretched to her. “True. You can’t,” she agreed. She downed the glass in one gulp, setting it down on the table with a clang. “But I can.” She drained the second glass.

We watched her, both Lexie and I. Me gingerly sipping the champagne that I decided I liked.

Lexie watched her more intently. With more knowledge behind her eyes. With more worry for her friend and the demons she was hiding.

Emma stared at us and at nothing, twirling the glass in her hands.

“Dude, if you find yourself pinning depressing-as-fuck quotes on Pinterest, then he’s not for you. Someone worthwhile makes you forget depressing quotes even exist, and if you see them, you stop reading at the first line because they’re so fucking sad and you’re so fucking happy. If your finger even hovers above that mouse, kick him to the curb. Because relating to someone feeling shitty means you, in that moment, were feeling shitty, and no man, not ever, is worth you feeling like that for even a moment. We girls make ourselves feel like crap enough without letting a man do it too. Also, you don’t want that bitch Sarah from high school knowing you’re in a bad place.”

I didn’t really know who she was talking to, because she was in the company of two people who weren’t in that position at all.

But I realized that was another story altogether.

One she wasn’t ready to tell yet.

But it was coming.

For now, she was living in fantasy and demanded we talk about possible ways to combat the ankle swelling Lexie might get.

And we let her live in that fantasy.

But reality was coming.

For all of us.

* * *

I knew something was wrong the second I walked into the house. All the warmth and happiness of before was snatched away the moment I smelled the air.

It was bitter. A dumb thing to think, maybe, but I could just tell something wasn’t right. And it wasn’t because I was drunk. I’d stopped at the one glass of celebratory champagne Emma and I had shared.

She’d finished the bottle.

Lexie dropped me off so I could surprise Sam.

For a start, it was quiet. Far too quiet. It was never quiet. Sam always had music playing. And more recently, Sam was always playing music, experimenting with his songs, sometimes with Lexie and sometimes just with me. We were usually naked.

But tonight, nothing.

No way could he be asleep. He texted me an hour ago telling me to take off my panties and put them in my purse.

The aforementioned panties had dampened at such a request and now were sitting in my purse.

“Sam?” I called, my heels echoing on the marble floor as I ascended the stairs.

Everything was silent.

Eerie.

“I’ll be silent when I’m dead.”

I don’t know why the statement Sam had said in passing weeks ago floated into my head at that precise moment, but it filled me with utter dread.

I’d once reveled in silence. Lived in it.

Now I wanted to get rid of it more than anything.

I tried to talk myself out of it. Maybe this was part of whatever Sam had planned for tonight.

So I sucked in a breath and headed to the bedroom.

The closed door was another omen. Wyatt had taken up residence in another mansion down the street, so Sam insisted on an open-door policy, considering it was just the two of us.

Despite the dread in my bones, despite the fact that I was expecting it, or something like it, I still lost my breath when I opened the door and entered the room. I swore the world tilted on its axis the minute it all came into focus, bile filling my mouth.

It was it.

The black hole that was going to suck in my entire universe until I was left with nothing.

Until I was nothing.

“Genie, so glad you could make it,” Simon said with a grin.

He was grinning because he was standing in the middle of the room with a gun pointed at Sam.

Sam’s eyes lazily went to me, then widened rapidly. The way they did it sickened me. Like in House of Wax when they were frozen in their bodies, unable to express their horror with anything but their eyes.

That’s what was in Sam’s.

But it hadn’t been there before. When he was alone in the room with the madman with a gun.

It was only when I got there.

His fear wasn’t for himself.

It was for me.

Laughable, really. Because I’d just entered a room that contained my abusive ex who’d tried to rape me and I didn’t feel an ounce of fear for myself.

All of my terror was reserved for the man in the center of my room, in the center of my life.

There was something wrong with him, the way he was struggling to move from his spot on his knees, his body jerking with effort, limbs limply hanging around him.

“Thumbelina,” he slurred. The words were saturated with the same fear that lived in his eyes, but it was muffled under some kind of film. Something that was thickening his tongue.

I stepped forward, forgetting the gun, intending on going to him, to Sam. To help him. To save him.

Simon pointed the gun at me. “Tut, tut, tut,” he said, shaking his head. “You stay there.” When I kept moving, made it apparent that the prospect of a bullet wasn’t going to stop me, he pointed it at Sam.

I immediately stopped, glaring at Simon. “What did you do to him?” I demanded.

Simon grinned wickedly, his eyes cold. “Nothing. Apart from the heroin I injected him with.” He laughed. “I highly doubt it’s his first hit. He’s scum, after all. And scum inject their blood with more scum. And now it’s in you.” His eyes roved over my body as if it was covered in filth.

“Why did you shack up with scum, Genie?” he asked, scratching his head with the barrel of his gun.

He’d gone off the deep end.

Breaking into Sam’s house, drugging him and then threatening us with a gun was evidence of that. But the emptiness filling his eyes cemented it. Craziness was a gaping hole in whatever made up the human mind. Everyone had it. Sometimes it was what made them the most interesting, like Sam.

But they had more, depth to mix it with.

Simon didn’t know more.

He didn’t have more.

Just that black hole that craved to suck up anything and everything it could.

“You broke up with me. Me,” he continued, circling Sam. I realized my mistake now, showing my weakness. Showing that fear of death or pain wasn’t what was going to give him whatever he wanted. No, I exposed my ultimate weakness.

Sam.

He grabbed on to it, using the gun pointed at Sam’s head to command my attention. “I was sure you would come crawling back eventually. I waited. Patiently. There was no way you could find better than me,” he scoffed, shaking his head. “I knew you’d realize that.” He glared at Sam. No, not a glare. The sucking gaze of pure evil. “And you would have. If he hadn’t come into town.” He pointed at Sam with his gun and then kicked him viciously in the ribs.

Sam emitted a garbled grunt, his body twitching.

The blow may as well have hit my own ribs. “Stop!” I screamed.

Simon glanced up at me casually, like this was just a regular conversation.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” I told him. “Anything. Just leave him alone.” I paused. I needed to take the attention away from Sam. This was no longer the story where the man in the white horse could save me. The man was pumped full of heroin. That in itself worried me about the prospect of an overdose. He was white. Almost translucent.

The knight couldn’t save himself, let alone me. So I had to save him, if I had any chance to save myself.

Even if it meant sacrificing myself.

“He’s not the reason I didn’t come back to you,” I said, tearing my eyes away from Sam with great difficulty. I worried that if I stopped looking at him, he might just slip away. I’d see him and he’d be still. Nothing moving. No sound.

No nothing.

But I had to look away, focus on the madman who had the power to take it all away from me. Focus on how I was going to take it back. “I’m the reason. It had nothing to do with Sam. It had everything to do with what a loser and a bully you were,” I hissed, planning on antagonizing him enough to put his murderous focus on me.

Sam’s eyes were flickering, his body twitching. Mine locked with them for a second and snatched a moment of his terrified lucidity of understanding about what I was doing.

“No,” he protested, the word barely audible.

I focused back on Simon, who luckily hadn’t seen any of it. His crazy was fixated on me.

He did not need to know that Sam might have been regaining motor skills.

“What?” he demanded.

I continued my glare. “You heard me. It wasn’t because someone better than you came along. It’s because I realized on my own that I was better than you. And you’re just a sad, sick man with an inferiority complex and a small dick,” I spat. My survival instinct was at a zero at that point. It didn’t matter to me as long as Sam had a chance.

“You bitch,” Simon hissed, lifting the gun.

I got it then. The Romeo and Juliet thing, the die for you kind of love. The kill for you kind of love. Because I was willing to take the bullet that was going to be heading for me any second. I didn’t want it. I wanted to live to be old and gray and have a lifetime of excitement with Sam. But I also didn’t want my lifetime to be full of a huge gaping hole where Sam should’ve been.

No matter what I used to think, I didn’t want a lifetime of solitude.

“Solitude is for the lonely or the damned.”

The words echoed through my ears. And I got them.

If that bullet hit Sam, took away my noise, my universe, I’d be damned. Completely and utterly.

So I didn’t move.

And then I watched in horror as Simon’s face changed from naked fury to pure, sick satisfaction.

A gunshot echoed through the room. The pain I expected radiated through every inch of me. I didn’t even know how I stayed standing.

But I did. I did, and I watched in horror as Sam’s body jerked with the impact of the bullet entering his body, blood pooling quickly around him.

Too quickly. You didn’t bleed that much, that rapidly unless something was bad.

Unless it was the end.

End.

I didn’t think then. Just acted.

I didn’t even remember how I got the gun from Simon. Aspect of surprise, maybe. The last thing he expected me to do after he shot the man I loved was charge at him and wrestle his gun from him.

I was the broken, beaten and victimized version of myself in his eyes.

I didn’t see myself through his eyes.

I saw myself through Sam’s.

That’s what made me successful, most likely.

I pointed the gun at Simon and he smiled.

Not just in insanity, but with lucidity.

The very last thing he expected me to do was empty the chamber into his rancid and evil body.

But that’s what I did.

Without hesitation.

And when that was done, I sank to my knees, the gun clattering to the floor as I fumbled through my handbag for my phone.

I found it and called 911, my other hand pressed to the gushing bullet wound in Sam’s chest.

“No!” I screamed. Or tried to scream.

It came out as a strangled whisper.

“Sam, please. You can’t die. You’re here for a good time and a long time, remember?” I choked out. “You’re here for us and me and that lifetime you promised.”

His body twitched as I robotically told the dispatcher what had happened and the address.

She responded just as robotically, telling me units would be there soon.

I watched my hands turn red. “Soon isn’t enough,” I murmured. “He doesn’t have soon. He doesn’t have now. And we were meant to have forever.”

Now I got why so many love stories ended with blood.

Because forever didn’t exist.

“I know you said you’re ready to leave, that you’ve lived enough,” I whispered, my voice almost as broken as my soul. “But I haven’t, Sam. I haven’t lived even half enough. You said you’d give me anything, Sam, so give me my other half. Give me my universe.”

It was the only thing I’d asked for, truly asked for from Sam.

He’d given me everything else. Without hesitation.

But he couldn’t give me this.

* * *

When visiting loved ones in a hospital, people always seem to comment on how the injured party “looked so small.” That’s all my mother kept saying when my father suffered his heart attack last year.

“He’s not a waifish man. Swims every day, and he has a weight set in the garage that he uses almost every night. He’s no pipsqueak. But that bed, that gown. It’s shrunk him.” The way she said it made it seem like it was a shortcoming, suffering a heart attack. That it was his fault for not looking how she wanted him to look while in a hospital bed.

She’d been sobbing it to her friends later that night when they’d brought over casserole and wine. That’s what good friends did, after all. Not that that was what they were, but they wanted to look like it. That was Mom’s life, a game of images, of surface. Of what looked the best. Who looked the best. Pity she didn’t have any marketable talent; she would’ve been perfect for Hollywood.

That’s what I’d thought had upset her the most. That Dad, with his gray pallor and labored breathing and disheveled hair, hadn’t looked right. He wasn’t playing his part right. He wasn’t supposed to suffer from a heart attack that meant she’d actually have to be the loving wife and take care of him instead of just pretending to. He was supposed to work enough so she could do minimal hours in the law firm where she worked as a secretary. He was to wear his hair clipped short, styled so it was tidy, neat and complimented his angular and masculine features. His suits were always to be classy, made to look more expensive than they actually were. He was meant to keep his affair with his own secretary under wraps, kiss Mom at the end of every day, compliment her lipstick and take care of her. Pretend he cared about the fucking pantomime she called her life.

I hadn’t factored into that.

Nor did I factor into the situation with my “small-looking” father. Despite the fact I was a woman facing the mortality of her parents. Despite his detached affection toward me, he was my father. He sneaked chocolate to me when Mom wasn’t letting me eat it, which was always. Brought a separate lunch to school when mom told the cafeteria I had allergies and could eat nothing but salad. Brought me a book from every city he visited. He’d usually already read it on the flight home. And he’d talk to me about it when we were done.

I had been upset then, seeing him in the hospital bed. But the kind of upset that suited my life with him, my relationship with my father. Slightly warm, but mostly cold. Detached.

But it wasn’t the case with Sam. He didn’t look small. He took up the whole room. Swallowed all the monitors and the sterile smell so it was just him.

His tattoos vivid color against the drab and gray room.

He was full of life.

Even when he wasn’t.

Even when I wasn’t.

I didn’t have a single thing hooked up to me, keeping me alive. I had no life-threatening injuries, apart from a couple of scratches.

But I didn’t feel alive.

I didn’t feel anything.

With my father, I’d been upset, even if it wasn’t as completely as I should’ve been when a daughter was faced with her father dancing between life and death.

He hadn’t died. He recovered quickly and went back to his miserable life with my mother.

I reasoned it might have been because I didn’t feel enough pain that I’d managed to feel it at all.

But seeing Sam dancing with death, after the doctors told me it was most likely his last dance, I felt nothing.

Not a single thing.

I was empty inside.

Because I couldn’t feel the pain that Sam’s death would bring. It would kill me. A part of me knew that. The part of me that was making sure I was experiencing an emotional wasteland seeing the man I loved being kept alive by machines.

Because of me.

I was sure that once even those machines couldn’t do their jobs and that terrifying and horrifying future came to pass, I’d feel it.

But for now, he was still here, radiating life even in death. So I owed it to him to find a way to keep myself together.

My soft footfalls echoed in the room as I gingerly made my way over to Sam.

Sam’s body.

Sam wasn’t in there. The doctors told me that.

“We can’t promise you anything. No one can. But we can tell you it’s going to take nothing less than a miracle to get him awake and coherent.”

“Awake and coherent.”

That was the doctor’s definition of life.

They obviously knew nothing about life.

About death.

My shaking hand settled atop his stationary one.

The tables had turned. I was the one whose hands couldn’t keep still, who couldn’t stand the static version of life.

He was the stationary one.

The one immersed in quiet.

And he was right.

Quiet was death.

And it lingered there, in the room, for days. Taunting me with its silence, with its ability to snatch my universe out from under me.

From around me.

Sam danced with it for days.

With the entrance and exit of every single person who loved him.

Who needed his loud presence in their life.

There were a lot of them.

I barely saw them.

Barely knew they existed.

I knew they talked to me. Or tried to.

You couldn’t hear a thing when you were damned with solitude.

And then I witnessed it. The most beautiful movement of Sam’s hand that I’d ever seen.

It started with a twitch so small I was sure I’d imagined it.

Gone insane and created some form of retribution out of the fragments of my destroyed mind.

Then it was more than a twitch. It was a squeeze. And then it grew, the motion continuing until the doctors spoke of miracles and the faces of Unquiet Mind stopped being so tortured.

Sam danced with death.

I danced with hope.

Or battled with each of them.

One of us won.

“Told you,” Sam croaked when they’d yanked the breathing tubes out of his throat and he was finally conscious and lucid enough to speak.

Those two words were whispered. Barely even rippled the sound waves. But they almost ruptured my eardrums with their sound.

“Told me?” I repeated finally, through my tears.

“Fairy tale is real,” he mumbled. “But they got it wrong. The man doesn’t save his princess. His princess saves him.”

And I did.

I’d saved him.

I lost a lot of sleep over almost losing him. Even after he fully recovered. Even after he put a ring on my finger and then our son in my belly.

I did not lose a single wink of sleep over the bullets I’d expended saving him.

Not a single second.

* * *

There wasn’t a neatly wrapped-up ending for a multitude of reasons. Mainly because this, us, everything we’d been through was nowhere near the ending. It was nowhere near the beginning either. It was somewhere in the middle. We had a lot of life to live, and not all of it was going to be easy. We weren’t going to be happy the entire time, but we would be living.

And we’d be together.

The rest would sort itself out.

I was terrified.

Which meant I was finally doing something right.

I was finally living.