Karen's surgery got scheduled for three weeks out, faster than anyone expected, and the relief of it nearly knocked me over the first time the doctor said the date out loud. Three weeks. Real, solid, written on a calendar instead of dangling somewhere in an uncertain future we couldn't afford to reach.
I went to see her every chance I got in the lead-up, partly to keep her spirits up and partly because I needed somewhere to put all the nervous energy that came with both the surgery and the increasingly complicated reality of being, on paper, an engaged man.
"You're doing the thing again," Karen said, one afternoon, watching me from her hospital bed with the particular sharpness she reserved for catching me in a lie.
"What thing."
"The thing where you say 'River' like it physically hurts you not to," she said, grinning. "You've said his name four times in the last ten minutes and you haven't even mentioned why."
"I haven't said his name four times," I said, though I genuinely couldn't be sure she was wrong.
"You so have. 'River said this.' 'River thinks that.' 'River's parents are—'" she stopped herself, eyes going wide. "Wait. His parents? You've met his parents?"
I felt the lie scramble together faster than I expected, the way it always did now, like the muscle had built up from overuse. "It's a long story," I said. "We've been spending more time together. It's getting kind of serious."
"Serious how serious," Karen said, sitting up straighter than her IV line probably allowed.
"Serious like I might be engaged," I admitted, which was, at least, technically true.
Karen's reaction was loud enough that a nurse poked her head in to check on us. "ENGAGED? Alex! You met this man, what, a month ago? And you're already—"
"It moved fast," I said, which felt like the understatement of the century. "He's—" I stopped, searching for words that would sound true without revealing anything that actually was. "He's not what I expected. Underneath everything."
"What does he look like," Karen asked, settling back against her pillows with the single-minded focus of someone who'd had very little excitement in her life lately and intended to extract every drop of it from this conversation. "Describe him properly this time, not just 'tall and hot.'"
"Tall," I said, "and hot," and laughed when she threw a pillow at me with surprising accuracy for someone three weeks out from major surgery. "Dark hair. Green eyes — like, genuinely unfair green, the kind that doesn't look real. Comes across cold to almost everyone, but he's not, not really. He's just careful. Spent his whole life being told what he's supposed to want, and I don't think anyone's ever actually asked him what he does want."
"You like him," Karen said, quieter now, studying my face. "Like, actually like him. Not just grateful-for-the-driver like him."
"I don't know what I feel," I said honestly, which was the first completely true thing I'd said about Law in this entire conversation. "It's complicated."
"Everything's complicated with you," Karen said, but she was smiling. "I want to meet him. Before the surgery, if I can. I want to see this unfairly green-eyed mystery man with my own eyes."
The request landed harder than I expected — a small, simple thing, and also exactly the collision I'd been quietly dreading since the moment I signed that contract. Karen meeting Law meant Karen meeting the man I'd robbed, the man currently blackmailing me into a marriage neither of us actually wanted, dressed up as the love story I'd been feeding her for weeks.
"I'll see what I can do," I said, and hoped, foolishly, that the surgery would take priority over everything else for just a little while longer.
I didn't know yet how much that single request — Karen's curiosity, her loneliness, her hunger for some small piece of the romance she'd never gotten to have for herself — would end up reshaping everything that came after. I just knew, sitting there watching her smile at the idea of meeting him, that some part of me had gone very quiet and uneasy, for reasons I couldn't yet put a name to.