She glanced up at the monitors. Things were changing on the screens. Heart rate up. Blood pressure up. She had no idea whether that was bad or good. At least there were no alarms?

“I’m right here,” Therese said. “And I’m going nowhere. No one is going to separate us.”

Even herself, she tacked on in her mind.

“Yes?” her mahmen said.

“Yes. I promise. I love you, and I wish… well, I wish a lot of things. But we’re back together now. All four of us.”

The idea that there wasn’t a fifth made her sad—even though Trez hadn’t been a member of the family, hadn’t been around for long, had played her. And the mourning of him was frustrating as hell. But emotions weren’t reasonable and couldn’t be reasoned with.

“Come home?” her mahmen asked.

“Yes, I will. Absolutely.” At this point, she was dying to get out of Caldwell. “But Dad said you didn’t go down south. Maybe that’s where we should head? Gareth can do his schooling from anywhere, he was saying.”

“Good.”

The tension eased out of her mahmen, and for a moment, Therese panicked that it was death that was making her go lax. But then no. It was peace.

“Sleep, Mahmen. You just rest. We’re all here.”

Sitting back, Therese watched over her mahmen, another monitor working in concert with, but without the specificity of, the other machines in the room.

A young left on a doorstep? Really? At a regular family’s home? She believed her mahmen, and Larisse certainly seemed clear on how it had all gone down. But jeez, it was like the storyline from a bad after-school special. How did something like that happen?

Time passed, again in that weird way it seemed to down here in the ICU. But maybe it was true all over the hospital. And her brother and father returned. And hugs were shared before Larisse took a nap. As she slept, everyone talked quietly, and Therese wanted to double-check the story, but not in front of her mahmen. That seemed disrespectful. Doubtful.

And the truth was, the details didn’t matter. Just like shared blood didn’t matter.

Family was so much more than DNA.

Eventually, Therese’s strength lagged and she realized it had been a while since she had had anything more than fitful rest. With her lids drifting down, and her body jerking itself back awake, she was on the verge of—

“Honey?” her father said.

Therese shot up right. “Mahmen! Is she—”

“She’s just fine.” Rosen smiled down at her and put his hand on her shoulder. “You, however, need some real sleep. Why don’t you go home for some rest and come back before dawn? Or you can stay in the apartment they gave us here?”

She hadn’t yet told them about the rooming house, and now that she was leaving with them, she didn’t feel the need to go into the details about that dump. And the idea that she could go there, grab some clothes, and then crash back here really appealed.

“You could ask Trez to give you a ride if—”

“No, Dad,” she rushed in. “I don’t want to bother him. I’ll just get fresh clothes at my apartment and come back fast.”

“There’s no hurry. You have your phone. If something happens, we’ll call—but things are really looking up.”

Gareth nodded from his chair. “Yeah, you need some shut-eye.”

“I’ll snag my toothbrush and return right away.”

Her father patted her shoulder. “Don’t hurry. I think we’ve got a lot of time ahead of us now.”

“Me, too.”

Therese got to her feet. Hugged everyone goodbye and pulled on her coat, which she’d left on the floor in the corner. In a daze, she walked out of the patient room, and the unit… and then, after a brief elevator ride, out of a kiosk into the forest. It was bitterly cold, and she huddled into her parka. Before she dematerialized out, however, and in spite of the shock of the winter air on her warm cheeks, she paused and stared up at the sky.

The forest was sleeping around her. The world seemed in repose as well. No sounds of deer mincing over snow-sprinkled brush. No squirrels scrambling up trunks. No birds in flight, seeking far-between and forgotten nuts. Not even a breeze, as if the wind, too, were exhausted from previous efforts.

Silence. Stillness.

Like space.

Standing by herself, she felt alone, and not in the sense that she could not find a crowd of people in which to lose herself. And this specific sort of isolation made her reflect on how, no matter how many hearts had been broken in the great passage of time, when it was your own, it was the first time it had ever happened.

Why, she thought at the heavens.

Except as she asked the question without speaking a word, she wasn’t sure exactly what “why” she was after. Why she had met Trez? Why she had happened to look like his mate? Why he had fallen into a whirlwind romance with her?

Well, she knew the answer to that last one. That, at least, was no mystery.

And as she considered the ins and outs of it all, as she replayed his kisses, his touches… the sex they had had… she came to understand the true nature of her pain. It wasn’t that Trez had fucked her over on purpose. He wasn’t some bastard like that. She had seen the regret on his face when everything had come out, and it had been an honest emotion—not that it had done anything to make her feel better in the moment.

It did keep her from hating him now, however.

No, it was more that she hadn’t been the one to be loved like that. She hadn’t been chosen by him. She had just been a vessel, nothing but a shell. A replacement vase swapped for the one that had been broken.

The sad truth was that she’d been bypassed even as they had been together, face-to-face, skin-to-skin. Invisible, though he saw her. Ether, even as he touched her body.

The pain was because she had felt found, when in actuality she had been nullified.

This was going to hurt for a while. It was also going to color how she saw males. How she interacted with them. How she did—or, more likely, did not—trust them.

It seemed the height of irony to be devastated by the death of someone she did not know and had never met. Yet the loss of Trez’s shellan had impacted her. Permanently.

Closing her eyes, Therese breathed the cold night air and calmed herself. She wasn’t sure it was going to work, and she decided if she couldn’t concentrate properly, she would just go back to the clinic and hang out there.

The next time she looked around, she was standing in the middle of her apartment.

Staring at the crappy furniture, she took another deep breath, and instead of clear Canadian air that was blowing in from the north… she smelled the complex bouquet of nose-death that seemed to emanate from the walls and floors of the flat.

Like everything had been sprayed down with Eau de Crime Scene.

Fates, she just wanted to go back to the ICU. And who’d have thought that would ever be a thing?

Still, instead of quickly gathering what she needed and getting the hell out of there, she walked around the empty space, her mind going places she’d rather it wouldn’t while her body went in circles in a place she didn’t want to be. But see, this was the problem with alone time—and the other reason that made her want to get back to her family.

Okay, she needed to get moving. Grab her toothbrush and an over-day bag. Return to where people she could trust were waiting for her.