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“It’s me.” A whisper floats around me, and a cool hand presses against my mouth. “Dr. Trevor.”
With my heart pounding hard enough to drown out a performance at the opera, it takes me a minute and another three whispers for the words to penetrate.
The moment I stop struggling, he leans so close his lips brush the shell of my ear. “I’m going to let go, but don’t scream. I had the nurse send the guy to one of the other Jane Does, but he will hear you if you scream.”
He waits for a second, and when I nod my agreement he peels his hand from my mouth and takes a step back.
I turn. Gazing down at me with sober brown eyes that I’ve never been happier to see is Dr. Trevor, who I’m almost positive is one of the good ones. I want to thank him or… something, but there’s a thing in my throat that won’t let me speak.
“If we get to the next floor down, we can ride the elevator the rest of the way. Can you manage stairs?” he whispers.
I can manage a goddamn mountain if that’s what it takes to get away. I nod.
When he holds his hand for mine, it doesn’t even cross my mind not to take it.
He grips my hand with his larger, warmer one and leads the way out of my room, down the hallway, and directly to the fire exit.
Not once does he slow or even look around. He just gets the job done. Maybe they teach doctors how to be like this in medical school because I never doubt for a second that he hasn’t done the same thing a thousand times before.
If my ribs hurt on the way down the stairs, I don’t feel it. The adrenaline flooding my body is doing such a good job of masking any pain I might be in that I don’t even care that the back of my hospital gown is flapping open as I jog down the stairs behind Dr. Trevor.
As we approach the double doors for the seventh floor, they fly open. Dr. Trevor yanks his hand from mine.
A nurse in a pair of hot pink scrubs, her black hair in a tight braid, glances up at us in surprise.
“Rachel, on break now?” How Dr. Trevor can sound as if we weren’t just sprinting down the stairs is beyond me. I’m in a battle to hide my gasping breaths from the nurse.
Her eyes drift over me and narrow. “Yeah, I was just—”
“You didn’t pass an old lady in a wheelchair, did you?” he interrupts. “Pink floral dress, gray hair, dabbing at her face with a lace napkin.”
What?
The nurse pauses. “Uh, no. Why?”
“She’s Claire’s grandmother, came to the wrong floor, and I said I’d bring Claire down. Elevators aren’t good for her heart, she says.”
He’s good.
When the suspicion clears from the nurse’s face, I realize just how good Dr. Trevor is. If he ever gets tired of medicine, he wouldn’t starve as an actor. “Oh, no. Don’t let me keep you. I’ll see you later.”
“Sure.”
Dr. Trevor turns to me. “Claire? You ready?”
I nod. “I’m ready.”
The nurse—Rachel—holds the door open for us and I emerge into a hospital floor almost identical to the one we just left above.
On our way to the elevator, my eyes widen in surprise when Dr. Trevor steps into a room beside the fire exit. After a moment, I follow.
I’ve barely had a second to take in the white room with an empty bed and not much else in it, then Dr. Trevor grips my arms and turns to press my back against the wall.
“Wait here, I’ll be right back,” he murmurs, and then he’s gone.
Less than a minute later, he’s back pushing a wheelchair. He doesn’t have to tell me to get in because he’s been five steps ahead of me all along.
My first reaction when I saw Nathan was to fling myself out of a window. His was to distract Nathan, stop me from killing myself, get me away, and all in a way that attracts the least attention from anyone.
