The sirens served only as screeching background music as the ambulance flew down the highway. The EMTs worked around Sugar while she clutched Jared’s limp hand, kneading his lifeless fingers, and let tears fall down her face in stricken silence.

Bloody gauze and beeping machines kept the technicians busy, but nothing they did offered much hope. A medic in the front seat was on a radio, giving status updates to the emergency room and talking in codes Sugar didn’t understand. But she knew each one transmitted was graver than the last.

It was in their tone. Their glances. The sympathetic looks sadly said they would be surprised if he pulled through.

Goddamn Jared. Damn him for loving her. Damn her for ever leaving his side, ever testing the boundaries of how far she could push him. Damn her screwed-up fears of love and relationships. If not for those mental hiccups, she would’ve had that much more time with him. She was prepared to barter with the devil for just long enough to nod yes to Jared’s marriage proposal and declare that her love ran just as deeply and was just as strong as his.

She was a moron—a pathetic, scared moron.

Why had she stuttered? Why had she ever questioned… him? Them? Anything? She’d been cowardly and selfish. Self-preservation had been more important than the man who had stood before her, more than once, and told her how it would be. Him and her. Forever.

However long forever lasted. The slow beeps and the high-pitched alarms sounding around her announced that the grains of sand in the forever hourglass were settling at the bottom.

The sirens died. The vehicle came to a sudden halt, then the driver floored it in reverse. Before the driver had parked, the back doors flew open, and medical personnel rushed in.

A man crawled over Jared, unhooking wires and continuing to work on him while others unlatched the gurney and pulled it free. Sugar pulled her hand from Jared’s, and a woman placed it across his chest without looking up.

Off he went, with his medical team working hard. No one had asked her to follow. Sugar watched his tethered body lie unresponsive, and she remained frozen in the back of the ambulance. She couldn’t swallow the grenade-sized bulge in her throat. Tears came harder and faster, until she dropped to her knees amid discarded bandages and empty sterile package wrappers. Sugar held her shaking hands in front of herself. She squeezed her fingers together tightly and then turned over her dark-crimson-dyed palms. The vivid creases and lines in her skin were sketched by Jared’s dried blood. She remembered years ago watching her mother study her palm.

A short love line and a long life line. That’s exactly what you want. Long term-love isn’t worth it, Lilly. It doesn’t exist. That’s the lesson I hope you take from me. Fall in love, and one day, you’ll be me. Years drowning in a marriage, wishing to hell you hadn’t done something so stupid. Men never stay true, and neither should you.