I stared at her silently. She needed to elaborate for me to understand what the hell she was talking about. She dropped the groceries, cans and vegetables rolling onto the floor, and hugged her midriff.

“My governess. Her name was Ms. Blanchet. She died when I was seventeen. On the night I met you, actually, at the carnival. I drove there after I found her. She had cancer. Lung cancer. She battled it for three years. The last few months, she spent in a hospice but then decided she wanted to die at home and not in a strange place around people she didn’t know and meant nothing to her. So she moved back to her apartment in the West End. She was sick, Sam. So very sick. She couldn’t eat, or breathe, or laugh without feeling pain. She started peeing in her bed at night, voluntarily, after she’d woken up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom one time and fell in the hallway, breaking her hipbone.

“But she was a proud woman and refused to wear a diaper. Something had changed after she broke her hipbone. Whenever I came to visit her—not in the capacity of a student anymore; she couldn’t teach, but I would visit her to provide company, seeing as she had no one else in the States—she asked me to help her take her own life.”

There was a pause. Silence hung in the air. Reluctantly, I grabbed a fistful of her dress and pulled her in, shutting the door behind us. My penthouse was the only apartment on the floor, but I still didn’t want to take any chances of anyone listening to this. We left the groceries outside. Aisling twisted her fingers together, staring at her feet, determined to finish her confession.

“I said no. Of course, I said no! That was the right thing to say. My whole life I’d dreamed of becoming a doctor so I could help people survive, not kill them. But every time I left her apartment after watching her light dim, I felt guiltier for refusing her. It tore me to shreds. The idea that I was denying her something she wanted so badly. Something she truly desired. Helping her make the pain go away. And I began to wonder … wasn’t it patronizing of me to make the decision of her living in pain?”

“You were just a kid,” I said tersely, but she and I both knew it was bullshit. Life didn’t care about your age, bank account, or circumstances. Life just happened. I was thirteen when I assumed my role as Troy’s successor. I’d crushed skulls, put bullets in people’s heads, tortured, killed, manipulated, and kidnapped people. Because life happened to me, and to stay alive, I had to adapt.

“She begged and begged and begged. She was slipping away from me, I could feel it.” Aisling stood there, by my door, tears streaming down her face.

I made no move to console her. It wasn’t what she needed in that moment, even an emotionally stunted dirtbag like me could see it. She had to get this confession off her chest. “The woman I’d looked up to since I was four, the woman whom my parents had collected from Paris to shape me into a lady—she was witty, sassy, effortlessly elegant and chic, and a heavy smoker,” she said pointedly, eyeing me. “She’d become a shadow of her former self. I didn’t know what to do. Until, finally, Ms. Blanchet made the decision for me. We had a fight. She told me to stop coming. Not to visit her anymore. Said she wouldn’t answer if I visited. That was three days before I met you.”

Her throat bobbed with a swallow, and she raked her shaky fingers through her hair as she took a ragged breath.

“I didn’t listen. Maybe I should’ve, but I didn’t. I couldn’t not visit her. So I did. I knocked on the door, rang the bell. No one had answered. I went to a neighbor downstairs that I knew had her spare keys. An older gentleman she used to take tea with before she’d gotten too sick. He gave me the key. I opened her apartment. I found her in the bathtub…” she looked sideways then to the floor, closing her eyes “…she used whatever energy she had left to cut her wrists and bleed out. She was in a river of blood. That’s why she had this fight with me. That’s why she didn’t want me to come anymore. She made up her mind about taking her own life. And she did it in such a painful, lonely way.”

“Nix,” I said, my voice gravelly. Suddenly, I forgot about being sick. I forgot about existing in general. Her pain took over the room and everything else ceased to exist.