Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 76717 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76717 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
I place a hand over my heart. “My God.”
“But you said there were two brothers,” Tabitha says, walking up from behind me and out onto the porch. “What happened to the other one?”
“He was found dead early this morning,” I say. “Gray Eyes over here figured out that he had been helping me, despite the fact that his brother had just died. So he had him killed, too.”
“Holy shit,” Tabitha says.
Jason nods. “Steve had a prior brain injury, and Tom had some preexisting heart condition. Their deaths were easily explained away.” His lip trembles. “Just like Lindsay’s was.”
Slow clapping.
“Very good, Dr. Lansing.”
I turn around, and my heart turns to ice. Ralph is up, his entire face covered in blood from the gash in his forehead, holding the knife from my kitchen.
In a flash, he pulls me to him, the cold steel of the knife against my throat.
“Ralph, don’t!” Jason cries out.
He presses the knife against my neck. “Don’t move, Lansing, or your tight little girlfriend gets her pretty little throat slit.”
“Why are you doing this?” Jason asks. “Lindsay’s gone. It’s over.”
Ralph shrugs. “It’s over when I decide it’s over. How the hell could she choose you over me? You’re a fake, Lansing. Poor doctor can’t do surgery, can’t even teach anymore.”
Jason’s muscles tense. He wants to beat the ever-living shit out of Ralph, but he doesn’t want to put my life at risk.
“Just put the knife down, Ralph,” Jason says evenly. “I’ve already called the cops. They’ll be here any minute.”
“How dumb do you think I am?” Ralph asks. “And I don’t care about the cops. All I care about is denying you the love of your life. I did it once, and I can do it again.”
He presses the knife into my throat, and I wince at the sharp pain. A trickle of blood meanders down my neck.
No.
I don’t want to die. This can’t be the end. I love Jason. I have a life, a future—
“Ralph, don’t—”
I gasp at the loud crack of a gunshot.
The knife clatters to the floor.
Ralph crumples under me, two separate pools of blood seeping out of him, one from the gash in his forehead, and one from a bullet wound just under his right eye.
I turn around.
Henry, his face pale, slowly places the still-smoking gun down.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Jason
Six months later…
I always wondered if it would be just like riding a bike. If muscle memory would take over, if the rhythm would come back—the steady pulse of focus, the breathless quiet of precision. But this isn’t a bike. This is a liver. A living, breathing second chance cradled beneath my gloved hands.
The moment the scalpel touches skin, it’s as if the lost years collapse in on themselves. I don’t feel hesitation. I don’t feel fear. I feel home. The old steadiness returns—not just in my hand, but in my mind. No tremor, no flicker of doubt. The repair worked. My hand remembers.
My team watches me closely. I feel their caution, their curiosity, their quiet hope that I still have it. But I tune them out, not out of arrogance—out of necessity. There’s only the field, the bleeding edge of anatomy, the soft give of tissue, the hum of the OR lights.
I move through the dissection with careful speed, my sutures landing clean, my clamps snapping into place like second nature. There’s a moment—one that always comes—when the graft is flushed, when the new liver turns pink.
And then—blood flow. Function.
Life.
My chest tightens, not from strain, but from something deeper. I almost lost the part of me that only exists in this room, in these moments.
I don’t smile. I don’t speak. But something shifts inside me, quiet and sharp. Not triumph. Not yet.
But I’m back.
And that changes everything.
“Great work, everyone,” I say.
“Beautiful work,” the surgical resident replies.
“Welcome back, Dr. Lansing.” One of the scrub nurses smiles through her mask.
I nod, leave the OR, peel off the bloody gloves, and wash up.
I have a party to get to.
Angie’s brother Henry is back in town, along with her other brother, Dave, and his wife, Maddie. Henry was shaken up after he shot Ralph. He had practiced with firearms before—all the Steels have to learn how to shoot a gun, according to Angie—but had never fired a gun outside of a shooting range, certainly not into a fellow human being.
But Ralph deserved it. And now he’s six feet under, and the world is better for it.
One day Henry will realize that he did what he had to do. And the woman I love owes her life to him.
The man with gray eyes—we later found out his name is Robert Templeton—was arrested for conspiracy to murder along with several other charges. He’ll be behind bars for the rest of his life.
Boulder in the summer is golden, but today it seems to shine brighter than usual. The sunlight spills over red rock and mountain peaks, the air warm but dry, wrapped in the scent of pine and something faintly sweet, like blooming wildflowers you can’t quite see. The streets hum with hikers and cyclists, dogs trotting alongside them, coffee cups in hand, like no one’s in a rush to be anywhere but here. There’s music on Pearl Street, barefoot kids playing in fountains, and that endless, open-sky feeling that anything could happen—and probably will, once the sun dips low and the mountains start to glow.