Page 84

She lifts it away. Neither of us says anything.

Then she steps back, half a pace, and puts her hands behind her.

“Give me a minute.”

“Take it.”

She goes behind the desk and fills two paper cups at the little sink, hands one across the counter and keeps the other, and I lean a hip against the desk and we stand there drinking water that isn’t doing either of us any good.

Astrid turns her cup once between both hands.

“I have had you in this building for eleven weeks.”

“Hard to miss.”

“My hands know what to do before I decide.”

“Apparently mine do too.”

She looks at my left hand around the cup. I hold it still.

“That is not funny.”

“No.”

So I stop trying to make it one.

She looks down the corridor toward Room 2. “I do not want to turn you back into a patient every time I touch you.”

“You did it once.”

“Once was enough for me to notice.”

“That sounds like you.”

Her eyes come back to mine.

She knows that shoulder well enough that her thumb got there before her head did, and she said so out loud, standing in her own reception.

She doesn’t know my left hand quit on me six days ago, because she asked me directly and I told her no.

I put the cup down on the counter between us.

“I still want to see you. Away from here.”

Astrid looks at me.

She doesn’t answer.

I wait. For once in my life I don’t fill it in for her.

Chapter fifteen

Astrid

Tova has put the house listing under the sugar bowl again.

One corner of it shows beside the glass when I come into the kitchen. The paper has gone soft along the fold, and the room she chose is still drawn on the back of it. Bed against the wall. Green desk under the window. Three books on a shelf that does not exist.