"I'm sorry. But you need to listen to me right now if you want to see our children." He reached forward and picked up the bag from the chair, holding it out toward her.
"I've already taken the boys to a new hospital," he said. His voice was measured, each word placed carefully.
"The doctor there is ready for Nathan's surgery. Everything has been arranged." He met her eyes with an expression of steady, reasonable authority.
"But first you need to get ready so we can go to them." Ruby did not take the bag. She looked at it. Then at him. Then at the bag again.
And something in her face, in the set of her jaw, in the quality of the stillness that settled over her in that moment, told a story that her fractured memory couldn't yet access, but her instincts were reading clearly, fluently, without a single missing word.
She did not know this man the way he claimed she did. She did not know this room.
