“Graham.”
He looked up from the bolt.He had graphite on the side of his thumb.
“Tomorrow I’m going to be in a hospital that I can’t look at you the way I want.You’re going to be inside that building doing the thing the rest of this operation depends on.The single thing I get to do today is walk through your house and make sure the doors close right behind you.”He went back to the bolt.“Let me have it.”
She let him have it.
* * *
She made an early dinner.
Pasta with whatever was in the fridge — jarred sauce, half an onion, the last of the parmesan, a handful of basil from the pot on the windowsill.He ate two helpings.She ate one.He cleared the table without asking and she let him because she’d learned that asking him not to do something he’d already decided to do was a waste of breath both of them needed.
At seven they sat on the couch and went over the route one more time — not the folder, not the floor plan, just the sequence in her head.Alarm, patients to the rally point, then east corridor, second floor, four minutes in Janet’s office.East stairwell.Out.
“Repeat it back to me one more time.”
“Graham, I’ve got it.”
“One more time.For me.Not for you.”
She repeated it.Word for word.Then she repeated it again, because he was looking at her in a way that said the second repetition was for the part of him that needed to hear her voice say it before he could let her go.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.”
He stayed until nine fifty-six.He kissed her once at the door — not the kitchen kiss from last night, not the second couch kiss either, but a third kind, briefer than the first and steadier than the second, the kind a man gives a woman the night before something that could go either way.He told her to set her alarm for five.He told her he’d see her in the building.
Then he walked to his truck and drove east on Golden Acres toward Lake Road.
She locked the door.The new bolt slid clean.She turned the deadbolt above it and stood with her hand on the door for a moment before she stepped back.
In her bedroom, she pulled tomorrow’s scrubs out of the dryer, ironed the shirt and the pants on the board she kept folded behind the door, and laid them out on the chair beside the dresser.The folded paper with R-Embry-NS written on it she slid into the inside chest pocket of the shirt.The burner phone went into the right thigh pocket.Her hospital ID badge on its lanyard, her watch, her wedding-band-size locket from her grandmother, the small rubber-banded pen that had survived eighteen months of charting — all of it laid out in the order she’d need it in the morning.
Clean.Pressed.Ready.
She got into bed at ten forty-five and turned off the light.
She didn’t sleep for a long time.
She thought about the latch.The graphite on his thumb.The way he’d said, ‘Let me have it,’ and she’d let him.
She thought about her mother’s voice.‘If the complicated part gets too heavy, you put it down and you come home.’
She thought about the four numbers.
Eventually, she slept.
Chapter 21
She was already awake when the alarm went off at five.
She’d slept in pieces — thirty minutes, an hour, twenty more, the kind of sleep that didn’t leave a person rested but did leave them ready, which was the part that mattered.She’d been on her back since four thirty-eight, watching the ceiling fan throw its slow shadow across the wall, running the route in her head.
Alarm.Patients to the east rally point.Then back into the building — against the flow, but with the cover of a nurse who’d gotten turned around in the evacuation.East corridor.Janet Creighton’s office, third door from the stairwell, four-pin combination.Filing cabinet, top drawer, sealed transfer authorizations.Photographs.Out through the east stairwell to the second-floor landing, where Graham would be waiting at the radiology access door.
She’d run the route eleven times in her head between three forty and four thirty-eight.The eleventh time was the same as the first.
