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Aurelio nodded but said nothing, still urging, still waiting.
“But that man trying to kill Grayson wasn’t the ‘problem’,” I went on. “Or, it wasn’t the source of the problem. You needed to find the source to stop it from happening again, like finding the source of a bleeder. So, you were doing it… tokeepGrayson safe.”
He nodded. “In part.”
“In part?” I could think of no other “part” to his motivation.
He smiled. “Your safety was my concern as well,cara mia.”
A warmth unfurled in my chest, but even as it did, my stomach roiled. Warmth was not the right response. There should be no warmth to hear that this man had tortured a human being for me. I should have been appalled. Disgusted.
“I think I do not belong in your world, Aurelio,” I said, less for his benefit and more because I needed it to be true.
He shook his head, smiling gently. “We live in the same world,cara. You are simply living without blinders on now.”
It felt like whatever world I’d been living in stuttered on its axis. But of course, he was right. There were no more separate worlds than there were literal boxes in my head.
I sighed and clenched my hands together in my lap. “I am having difficulty seeing the benefit in losing those blinders.”
Aurelio shook his head, quick and sharp, like he didn’t believe it for a moment. “With blinders on, Dr. Dawson, would you have gone searching for this?” he asked as he picked up a folder that had been lying on the bench beside him.
“What is it?” I asked as he handed it to me.
“The information you requested about young Mr. Thomas.”
I stared at the file, a boy’s life all summed up on a few pieces of paper.
“Do you know what’s in here? What it says?” I asked, still staring. The boy’s story was either confirmed or refuted by what laid inside this folder.
He nodded. “Si,I do.”
“And?”
He smiled gently. “Trust your intuition,cara mia. What is your gut telling you?”
Trust my intuition? With a patient, certainly, but to weigh a man’s words? To judge the subtle nuances of his body language?
Aurelio was waiting patiently, still smiling, still urging me to think harder, to look deeper.
“I think the boy has been telling the truth,” I confessed.
His expression remained unchanged as he nodded again to the folder, encouraging me to open it.
School transcripts. A clean criminal record. A half dozen hospital reports for his mother. And one for Grayson—a broken arm and a split lip, five years ago. That’s when his mother had fled with her two children and filed a restraining order against an abusive husband.
A lump formed in the back of my throat. I’d worked in this woman’s body, had her blood on my hands. In some ways, I’d known this woman more intimately than anyone else, and yet, I’d known nothing. I’d inquired about nothing. She’d died, and I’d moved on. To the next patient, to the next broken body.
The Ice Queen.
I nodded, swallowing back the lump. “Thank you, Aurelio,” I said, back stiff, hands clasped on top of the closed folder in my lap.
He shook his head and laid a hand on mine. “In that room,” he nodded toward the hospital, “you do what you have to do. You keep yourself distant, detached, because deep down, you know that’s the way it has to be. There is nothing wrong with that.”
“I suppose you speak from experience.”
He squeezed my hand. “I do.”
He was right again, of course. I remained detached because I did care. To regret that would be to regret the lives I had saved.
