The address was a forty-minute drive from the hospital.
Roman didn't speak for most of it.
Daniel drove. He had insisted on that without making it a conversation, simply taking the keys from Roman's hand with a look that said *don't argue* and walking to the driver's side without waiting for a response. Roman hadn't argued. He sat in the passenger seat, his elbow against the window, his eyes on the road ahead, and let the city pass without seeing it.
The morning had settled into something grey and unremarkable. Traffic moved. People walked. The world continued in its ordinary way, completely indifferent to the fact that Jay was lying in an ICU bed with machines breathing for him and a fifty-fifty number that Roman could not stop hearing.
He turned it over in his mind the whole drive.
Not the confrontation ahead.
Not what he was going to say or do when he got there.
Just Jay.
The way he had looked through the glass. The smallness of it. The wrongness.
