"And Graham found you."
"Graham found me.And then he told me about you."
Maren picked up the folded paper.She read both sides once.Then she folded it again, smaller, and slid it into her own back pocket.
"There's something else," Rose said.
Maren met her eyes.
"A patient I admitted four years ago, before I left.Young.early-twenties.She came in as a sealed transfer from a facility I didn't recognize, and she was awake when I started her assessment.She told me her name was Eileen.She gave me a four-digit code — 0917 — and she asked me to write it down somewhere she couldn't see.I logged it in the shadow record under the bay number, not under any name.I didn't know what it meant.I just wrote it down because she asked me to."
Maren didn't move.
Three weeks ago.Bay two.A woman in her mid-twenties on a ventilator who'd opened her eyes for thirty seconds, who'd squeezed Maren's hand twice, and who had — in those thirty seconds — mouthed four numbers Maren had been trying to make sense of ever since.
Zero-nine-one-seven.
"She came back," Maren said.The words came out level.She was surprised by how level.
"They bring them back," Rose said quietly."When they need medical care they can't provide in whatever facility they're holding them.The hospital is a waypoint, but it's also a repair shop.They bring them in, stabilize them, and move them out before anyone can ask questions."
The room was quiet.The coffeepot ticked on the counter as it cooled.Graham stood with his arms crossed and his eyes on the floor — the particular stillness of a man who was listening to something he already knew and was hearing it again for the cost it carried.
"Would you be willing to give a formal statement?"he asked.
"When it's over," Rose said."When Montgomery is in custody and Creighton can't reach a phone.Not before."
"Fair."
Rose stood.She picked up her mug, carried it to the counter, rinsed it under the tap, and set it upside down on the drying rack beside Graham's, and the gesture was so automatic — so much the habit of a woman who cleaned up after herself in another woman's kitchen — that Maren had to look down at the table for a moment.
Two mugs on the drying rack.Side by side.
Rose turned to face her."The woman before me.The charge nurse Creighton transferred out before I ever worked the floor.Her name was Stella.I don't know what happened to her."
"We're working on it," Graham said.
Rose nodded.She picked up a canvas tote from beside the door — a tote, not a duffel, Maren noticed, because the duffel was in the car — and looked at Maren one more time.
"I should have stayed," she said."I should have done what you did."
"You survived," Maren said."That's not nothing."
"It's not enough."
"It is for now."
Rose's mouth pulled at the corners.The memory of a smile, not the thing itself.Then she looked at Graham.
"You'll call me when it's done."
"The minute the cuffs are on him."
She walked out the screen door and across the porch.Maren listened to the engine of the silver Honda turn over and gravel crunch under the tires.The sound moved up the drive and faded into the trees.
* * *
The cottage was quiet.
