A hand.
She registered the hand before she registered the voice — that warm, down-from-above quality of a hand appearing in her field of vision, palm up, fingers slightly open, offered.
She opened her eyes.
Raven was crouching beside her.
The elegant, unhurried quality of him — crouched at her level, his forearms on his knees, that patient quality of a man who was not going to rush this.
She looked at his hand.
She looked at his face.
"You destroyed my life," she said.
The flat quality of it. Not accusation-volume. Just — the flat, true, bottom-of-something statement of a woman lying on a hospital floor looking at the person responsible.
He held her gaze.
"Come with me," he said.
She looked at the corridor.
At the direction Vikram had walked. At the empty space where her husband had been. At the paper beside her with the report on it.
She looked at Raven's hand.
