The doctor’s words hung in the air like a heavy fog, suffocating the brief flicker of peace we had managed to find. I looked down at the tablet in his hand, then back to the man in the bed. Liam was watching me, his jaw tight, his eyes clouded with a complex mixture of pain and something that looked dangerously like resignation.
"Sarah," Jasmine whispered from the corner, her voice small. "You don't have to... you don't have to be his savior."
But that was the lie Jason had lived by—that I was his, a part of him, a limb he could manipulate or discard as he saw fit. And now, the law was doubling down on that delusion. In the eyes of the state, I wasn't a woman who had just survived a mountain-side execution attempt; I was the wife. The partner. The person responsible for deciding if his h
