For a moment he just looked at her.
Then he exhaled, long and unsteady, and closed his eyes. “Maya.”
“All my markers are stable,” she said, softer now. “Heart function normal. Blood pressure controlled. She used the word excellent, which I think doctors only do when they’re feeling reckless.”o enough to look at her, he said, “You did it.”
Maya shook her head and smiled through tears. “We did.”
He nodded. “We did.”
Later, after they had checked once more on Grace and turned off the kitchen light and gone to bed in the quiet, ordinary peace of a life that had become honest, Taylor lay awake for a few minutes longer, watching the city throw faint patterns across the ceiling.
He thought about the man he had once been—the one at the penthouse window with whiskey in hand, mistaking acquisition for vitality and performance for power. That man had believed intimacy was negotiable, that admiration was the same as love, that every challenge in life existed to be mastered or monetized. He had made a wager because he was arrogant enough to treat a human life as terrain.
