She knew.
She didn't need me to explain it, didn't need the dramatic villain monologue or a PowerPoint presentation titled Why My Life Keeps Exploding.
She knew exactly why this had happened. Why five bullets had torn through me in a concrete garage like I was a plot device. Why her mother stood beside her shaking like a glass set too close to the edge of a table and not in a morgue.
Margaret was trembling. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies. The quiet, constant kind. Micro-quakes running through her frame, hands locked around Charlotte's arm like that arm was load-bearing architecture.
She'd barely finished healing from Miami. From the kidnapping. From weeks of terror and therapy and pretending she was fine when she very much was not. She'd watched me almost die once already saving her.
And now the universe had apparently decided to run the sequel.
