“Six-thirty Monday,” he said.“Work the floor like any other day.When the alarm goes off, you move your patients.Then Janet’s office.Four minutes.East staging point after.”
“I’ve got it.”
“If anything goes wrong, you come to me.East stairwell.Not to the staging point.Not to anyone else.”
“Graham.”
“Please.”
“I’ll come to you.”
He nodded once, pushed off the doorframe she was leaning on — didn’t kiss her again, because if he kissed her again he wasn’t leaving — and walked to his truck.
* * *
Lake Road was empty.
He drove with the windows cracked and the radio off and the taste of her still on his mouth.Cypress trees closed overhead at the bend past Wes Charles’s place.He took the gravel turn slow, parked in the dirt turnaround beside his cottage, and sat for a moment in the cab with both hands on the wheel.
Thirty-four hours.
Inside, he didn’t turn on the lights.He stood in the dark kitchen and drank a glass of water from the tap and listened to the cypress trees outside doing what cypress trees do at night, which was almost nothing.Then he went to the bedroom, set the alarm for four-thirty, and lay down on top of the covers in his clothes.
He didn’t sleep for a long time.
He thought about the dish towel.The pulse under his palm at the back of her neck.The way her hands had fisted in his shirt as if he might disappear if she didn’t hold him in place.
He thought about Ronan saying ‘too close’.About Ronan being right.About the version of Monday morning that ended with the cuffs on Montgomery and Maren walking out the east doors at oh-nine-fifteen with a notebook in her hand.
He thought about the version that didn’t.
He set his right hand flat on his chest, over his heart, where her palm had been.He counted.Sixty-eight beats per minute.Elevated.Not by much.
By enough.
Chapter 20
Maren woke at six twenty-three with her hand still on the place at the back of her neck where Graham’s palm had been the night before.
She lay in the half-light a minute, taking stock the same way she took stock at the start of any shift — pulse, breathing, the parts of the body that hurt, the parts that didn’t.Her mouth was dry.Her shoulders were tight.The pillow on the other side of the bed was undisturbed.She’d slept on top of the covers with the ceiling fan going.
Twenty-six hours.
She got up, pulled on a flannel shirt over her clothes, and went to the kitchen.
The coffee took four minutes.She drank the first cup standing at the kitchen window, watching the back porch and the squat shape of the Bird of Paradise in its terracotta pot.The fronds were getting heavy.The notebook had been buried in soil under a freezer bag for three weeks now, and the plant had grown around the disturbance the way plants did when you stopped fussing with them.
Tomorrow morning, she’d carry that notebook into the hospital one more time.
By tomorrow night, it would be evidence.
She stepped out onto the back porch in her bare feet.The boards were cool.A mockingbird ran through its catalog from the bottlebrush tree by the fence.She crouched in front of the Bird of Paradise, not to disturb it — just to look.Three weeks of growth.Two new fronds.The plant didn’t know what was buried underneath it.The plant was just a plant.
She went back inside and refilled her coffee and looked at her phone on the counter.Six fifty-eight.
Two minutes early.
She picked it up and dialed her mother.
