EMBER’S POV

I sit with Maurice for twenty minutes before Knox comes to find me.

Twenty minutes isn’t long enough for everything I want to say to a man who is lying in a hospital bed with tubes in his arms and machines counting his heartbeats.

But twenty minutes is what I have because we’re leaving Alaska today and there’s a list of things that need doing before we board that plane.

Knox has been letting me take my time, but I can feel him hovering in the corridor the way he hovers when he’s being patient against his natural instincts, which is to say: loudly.

“I’m going to find...