Page 73 of Angels Are Falling

I laughed. “August drew a mushroom.”

“A mushroom with an umbrella’s spirit.”

I stared at him. “That is not how Pictionary works.”

He shrugged. But when Bella’s face lit up like a small sun after Kai let her have another undeserved point, I decided cheating in board games was an acceptable flaw in a man.

Jamie laughed at something August had drawn. Bella was leaning against Kai’s arm with her fez tipped sideways, and the room smelled of fire, wine, and lasagna still faintly in the air. The kids were relaxed, and they looked happy.

By the second round—because they twisted my arm into another—Bella had stopped keeping score, which she had been in charge of. Instead, she was drawing things unprompted on the back of the scoring sheet. She showed me the picture she was drawing of her family. It was the five of us standing side by side. We were all the same height except for Kai, who was significantly taller. Kai decided it was fridge-worthy, while I rolled my eyes. Of course he thought it was refrigerator-worthy—he was clearly the hero of her drawing. As if the height wasn’t enough, Bella had drawn a cape on his back.

It was much later in the night when I realized that Bella didn’t draw Stefan into her perfect family.

The problem was that none of us noticed it, either.

Chapter

Twenty-Three

AMELIE

“Morning, Mrs. Cavendish.” Deena, our charge nurse, handed me a patient file without looking up from her computer.

I blinked. “Sorry?”

She looked up. “It’s the H&P file Dr. Nash requested.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Took the file that the on-call doctor had requested without a word.

She called me Mrs. Cavendish, I was almost certain. Deena had been calling me Amelie since the day I started. She had never called me anything else. How would she even know that my name had been legally changed to Amelie Cavendish?

Perhaps I misheard.

I walked away, not wanting to bring attention to the matter.

The second time it happened, I was certain of what I’d heard. It was notable because Christian from radiology barely spoke to anyone before ten. He flagged me down at the supply cart. “Mrs. Cavendish, Dr. Kwon wants to see you at noon.”

I stared at him. “Christian, you know my name.”

“I do,” he agreed, in the tone of a man who had been specifically instructed to use a different one.

“Then why are you calling me⁠—”

“Noon,” he repeated pleasantly and walked away.

By the third Mrs. Cavendish—from Lin, the sweetest woman on the floor—I stopped pretending I didn’t know what was happening.

Kai.

Obviously, he was behind it. It was stupid to think he would just let the name change thing go.

I stood in the corridor for a moment and breathed through my nose before I did something drastic. How had he convinced everyone at the hospital to call me Mrs. Cavendish? It was a special kind of audacious.

Things had actually been okay with Kai recently. We had a surprisingly lovely weekend with the kids. The five of us made breakfast together. Kai made pancakes while Jamie and August set the table. Bella and I squeezed a dozen oranges with the kind of urgency that children bring to any messy task.

Later, we went to the amusement park. The kids were excited and barely reacted when I broke the dreaded news—their brother had left early and wouldn’t be joining us. At the very least, I thought Bella, who’d always been particularly attached to her big brother, would be inconsolable. But she was busy dragging Kai to every ride, something he dutifully obliged. He had blended into our family so seamlessly that sometimes I wondered if we were merely trying to reenact a memory that none of us actually had.

The apex of the drama came when Bella overestimated her tolerance for cotton candy and vomited blue and pink all over the ride operator’s Crocs. Kai handled it like he’d been training for this his entire life, gently wiping her face and paying the operator handsomely for his troubles. Kai was so gracious that by the end, the ride operator was the one apologizing to him.