KNOX’S POV
The paramedics take over from Ember’s hands, and the transition is ugly — she doesn’t want to let go of Maurice’s chest, doesn’t want to stop being the thing between him and death.
I have to physically lift her off the floor and hold her against me while two men in uniforms slide in and do what trained professionals do when a man has a bullet in his lung and a heartbeat that has no medical right to exist.
I find Queenie in the kitchen, sitting on the floor with her back against the cabinets.
She is pulling in ragged, hiccupping breaths—the sound of a woman who has cried so hard for so long that her body is reacting involuntarily.
Her phone rests in her lap, but her hands are shaking too badly to hold it. It keeps sliding off her thighs. There’s blood on her jacket that isn’
