KNOX’S POV

The paramedics take over from Ember’s hands, and the transition is ugly — she doesn’t want to let go of Maurice’s chest, doesn’t want to stop being the thing between him and death.

I have to physically lift her off the floor and hold her against me while two men in uniforms slide in and do what trained professionals do when a man has a bullet in his lung and a heartbeat that has no medical right to exist.

I find Queenie in the kitchen, sitting on the floor with her back against the cabinets.

She is pulling in ragged, hiccupping breaths—the sound of a woman who has...