The morning of Karen's surgery, I threw up twice before I even left my apartment.
I told myself it was nerves about the procedure itself — six hours, the surgeon had said, maybe longer if anything complicated turned up once they were actually inside — and that was true, as far as it went. But underneath it was something rawer, older, the same fear I'd carried since I was nine years old watching my mother fall apart over a phone call about my father. Hospitals had taken something from me once already. I didn't trust them not to try again.
My mother was already in the waiting room when I got there, hands wrapped so tight around a paper cup of coffee that her knuckles had gone white. I sat beside her and didn't say anything, because there wasn't anything to say that either of us hadn't already said a hundred times over the past two years.
Law showed up an hour into the wait, which I hadn't expected and didn't ask him to do. He sat down on my other side without a word, and when my mother glanced over, surprised, he simply said, "I wanted to be here," like that explained everything it needed to.
"You didn't have to," I said quietly.
"I know," he said. "I wanted to anyway."
The hours moved the way hospital hours always do — too slow to track normally, too fast once you looked up and realized half a day had disappeared. My mother dozed off around hour three, exhausted past the point of staying upright, and Law shifted slightly so her head could rest against his shoulder instead of mine without waking her.
"Tell me about your father," he said quietly, somewhere around hour four, when the silence had stretched long enough to start feeling unbearable.
I hadn't planned on talking about it. But something about the sterile lighting, the exhaustion, the particular kind of vulnerability that comes from sitting in a hospital waiting room for hours with no control over anything happening on the other side of those doors, made the words come easier than they usually did.
"He used to take me and Karen fishing," I said. "Every summer, even though none of us were any good at it. We never caught anything. I think that was kind of the point — just sitting there together, not actually trying very hard."
"He sounds like he loved you," Law said.
"He did," I said. "That's what makes it worse, sometimes. Knowing exactly what we lost instead of just imagining it."
"I don't know what that's like," Law admitted, after a moment. "Having someone who loved me without conditions attached. My parents love an idea of me. The version that marries the right person and runs the casino exactly the way they would. I'm not sure they've ever met the actual me long enough to love that instead."
"That's not love," I said. "That's just management."
He laughed — a real laugh, short and surprised, like the observation had caught him off guard. "Markus would agree with you," he said. "He's been telling me that for years. I never quite believed him until just now, somehow."
We sat with that for a while, not talking, his shoulder solid and warm against mine in a way I was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of. When the surgeon finally came through the doors at hour six and a half, exhausted but smiling, telling us the surgery had gone better than expected and Karen was already in recovery, I cried before I even fully processed the words — relief and exhaustion and two years of fear breaking loose all at once.
Law didn't say anything. He just put his arm around me and let me fall apart against his shoulder, right there in the waiting room, in front of my mother and a half-dozen strangers and absolutely no audience that mattered for the performance we were supposedly putting on.
It didn't feel like a performance. That was the part that scared me most, once I'd calmed down enough to notice.
"Thank you," I said later, once my mother had gone in to see Karen and it was just the two of us in the hallway. "For being here. You didn't have to be."
"I keep telling you that," he said. "I keep meaning it."
"Why," I asked, because the contract didn't cover this — didn't cover six hours of sitting with my mother's head on his shoulder, didn't cover the way he'd asked about my father like the answer actually mattered to him.
"I don't entirely know," he said, and for once, the careful, calculated edge he carried everywhere else had gone quiet. "I just know I wanted to be here. For you. Not for the contract."
I didn't have an answer for that. I just looked at him for a long moment, something unfamiliar and frightening shifting loose in my chest, and didn't look away first.