He spread his hands.
“But she’s still in that bed,” he said. “So none of that fixes anything.”
I stood up.
“I should call security,” I said. “I should have you thrown out and banned and—”
“You can,” he said. “You’d be right to.”
He didn’t try to argue.
He gave a tired half-smile.
He just looked like a man waiting for a sentence.
“The first time I came here,” he said, “was a little while after I completed my sentence. I needed to see if she was real. Not just a name in the report.”
He nodded toward the ICU side.
“Dr. Patel wouldn’t let me in,” he said. “Said it wasn’t appropriate. So I sat in the lobby. Then I came back the next day. And the next.”
He gave a tired half-smile.
He looked up at me with honest pain in his eyes.
“Finally, Jenna told me you were at a meeting with the social worker,” he said. “She said I could sit with Hannah for a bit. She warned me you probably wouldn’t want me there if you knew who I was.”
“She was right,” I snapped.
He nodded. “Yeah. She was.”
He looked down at his hands.
“I picked three o’clock because that’s what the accident report said.”
He looked up at me with honest pain in his eyes.
“You could’ve just stayed away.”
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