Page 122 of Savage Surrender

Everyone looks at the food as if it might confess, but no one provides an answer.

The man on the floor grabs my skirt, and his fingers yank so hard the fabric bites into the back of my knees. I drop beside him.

“Can you breathe?” The question is foolish even as I ask it. “No, don’t try to talk. Do you have medicine? An injector? Are you having an allergic reaction?”

His eyes shift toward the coat bunched under his hip.

I get my hand into one pocket and find keys, two pens, a roll of wintergreen mints. The other pocket has a small plastic case in it. Somebody behind me says an ambulance is coming. Somebody else says we should wait for someone who knows what they’re doing, and I nearly agree. The certainty in that stranger’s voice is stronger than the instructions printed on the injector.

I don’t know what I’m doing. But his grip loosens.

“No,” I say, my voice firm. “Hey, stay with me.”

I pull off the cap, press the injector against the outside of his thigh, and push until it clicks.

His whole body twists. I leave it in and count too quickly, lose my place, start over. The floor under my knees is sticky with spilled punch. The man’s face is sickly pale beneath the red, and I can hear my own voice telling him that help is coming.

By the time the paramedics shoulder through the crowd, he won’t let go of my hand.

“Sir, I need you to let go of her.”

One of the paramedics glances at me. “Are you with him?”

“I don’t know him.”

The man looks up at me, still fighting for each breath. Hurt crosses his face, which is absurd.

“Kate,” I tell him. “My name is Kate.”

His mouth silently shapes my name. Kate.

“What’s yours?”

It takes him two attempts. “Emmett.”

“All right, Emmett. They’re taking you to the hospital now.”

His grip tightens again.

“I can come,” I say.

I don’t know why I offer. I have an eight o’clock lecture.

He gives the slightest nod.

In the ambulance, he keeps his hand around two of my fingers. The paramedic asks him the same questions several times, and his answers come hoarse and halting. Peanuts. In the icing. Severely allergic.

Thirty years later, a peanut shell breaks between my fingers while a woman at county detention tells me she can’t confirm whether my mate is in the building.

Salt catches in the split beside my thumbnail and burns. Ouch.

“Explain your intake protocol to me, please,” I say, “because my husband, Gregory Quinn, left our home and never returned. Our son had to find out where he was because no one called me. I need to know if he’s been allowed a telephone call. His shoulder was already troubling him, and if he was hurt when they took him in⁠—”

“Ma’am, I understand you’re upset.”

The pen stills over my notepad.

“I am upset. My husband is a good man. He doesn’t belong in jail.”