Sara nodded again, forcing herself not to look away.
Five years.
She had mourned her husband for five years. She had been alone for five years. She had waited and waited for the ache to go away for five long, lonely years.
“Sara?”
Sara realized she’d missed a question. “Yes?”
“I asked could you go check on him? I know it’ll be hard with Lena in there, but maybe you can do some of your doctor talk and see if you can find out anything they’re not saying?”
Sara couldn’t think of a reason not to. It was why she was here, after all. To help Nell. To help Jared. To be her husband’s proxy as his son lay in a hospital bed. Even Chief Lonnie Gray had assumed Sara would play her part.
So she did.
Sara stood from the couch and left the tiny waiting room. She was still dressed in her hospital scrubs. The nurses’ eyes passed over Sara as she pushed open the doors to the ICU and walked down the hall. The board behind the desk gave Jared’s room number, but Sara would’ve known where he was by the cop stationed outside. The officer was standing a few yards down from the nurses’ station, arm resting on his holster. There was a glass wall separating Jared’s room from the hall. The curtain was half-closed. The door was open.
The cop gave Sara a nod. “Ma’am.”
She didn’t respond, just stood in the doorway to the room, acting as if she belonged.
The overhead lights were off. The machines provided a soft glow to see by. Jared’s face was swollen. His body was still. Sara did not need to see his chart. The equipment in the room told the story. Pleur-evac connected to wall suction for the pneumothorax. Ventilator to assist breathing. Three IV pumps pushing fluids and antibiotics. NG tube to wall suction to keep the stomach empty. Pulse ox monitor. Blood-pressure monitor. Heart monitor. Urinary catheter. Surgical drains. A crash cart was pushed against the wall, the defibrillator on standby.
They weren’t expecting Jared to rally anytime soon.
With great resignation, Sara forced herself to look at the corner opposite the bed.
Lena was sleeping. Or at least her eyes were closed. She was balled up in a large chair. Her arms were wrapped around her legs, knees hugged to her chest. She was wearing hospital scrubs, probably because her clothes had been booked into evidence.
She seemed much the same. A yellowing bruise arced underneath her left eye. The bridge of her nose had a linear cut that had started to scab. Neither was unexpected. Sara could not think of a time when Lena didn’t have some visible bruise or mark that came from living her life so hard. The only thing different was her hair. It was longer than the last time Sara had seen her. At the funeral? Sara couldn’t remember. No one in the Linton family could bear to utter the woman’s name.
Sara took a deep breath, then walked into the room.
In many ways, seeing Jared was much harder than seeing Lena. He looked so much like Jeffrey—the dark hair, the tone of his skin, the delicate eyelashes. He was built like his father. He walked with the same athletic grace. Jared even had the same deep voice.
Sara put her hand to his face. She couldn’t stop herself. She stroked her thumb along his forehead, traced the arc of his eyebrow. His hair was thick and surprisingly soft, like Jeffrey’s had been. Even the scruff of his beard felt familiar, was growing back in the same pattern as Jeffrey’s.
Lena still hadn’t moved, but Sara could tell she was awake now—watching.
Slowly, Sara took her hand away from Jared’s face. She would not let herself feel ashamed for touching him, for thinking the obvious thoughts, making the obvious connections.
Lena shifted in the chair. She unfolded herself, rested her feet on the floor.
Sara held Jared’s hand. The palm was calloused. Jeffrey’s hands had always felt smooth. His nails had been trimmed, not bitten to the quick. His cuticles weren’t torn at the edges. Sometimes, Sara had caught him using the oatmeal-scented lotion she’d kept on the table by their bed.
Lena stood up from the chair.
Sara’s heart hammered in her chest. She didn’t know why. Just being in the same room with Lena made her feel nervous. Even with the cop outside. Even knowing that there was no way Lena could harm her, Sara felt unsafe.
And Lena, as usual, was oblivious. She stood by the bed. She didn’t touch Jared. Didn’t reach down to ease him or to reassure herself that he was still there. Instead of holding him, she held herself. Her arms were wrapped around her waist. She had always been so goddamn self-contained.
“Sara—” Lena breathed. It was more like a sob. Lena had never been ashamed to cry. She used it to great effect. She hissed in a mouthful of air, her body shaking from the effort. Her hand gripped the railing on the bed. Her wedding ring was yellow gold with a small diamond. Blood was caked into the setting. She was waiting for Sara to say something, to make it all better.
Automatically, the words came to Sara’s mind, the advice she had given over countless hospital beds: It’s okay to touch him. Hold his hand. Talk to him. Kiss him. Ignore all the tubes coming out of his body and lie beside him. Let him know on some basic level that he is not alone. That you are here to help him fight his way back.
Sara said none of this. Instead, she chewed at the tip of her tongue until she tasted blood. Her heart was still pounding. The fear was gone. A coldness had taken over. Sara could feel it moving through her body, its icy fingers wrapping around her torso, scratching at her throat.
“I can’t—” Lena’s voice caught. For Sara, it was like listening to herself five years ago. Just with those two words, she felt it all over again. The devastation. The loss. The loneliness.
“I can’t—” Lena repeated. “I can’t do it. I can’t live without him.”
Sara gently pulled her hand away from Jared’s. She smoothed down the sheet, tucked it in close around his side. She looked at Lena—really looked at her straight in the eye.
“Good,” Sara told her. “Now you know how it feels.”
6.
Will rode his motorcycle around the Macon General parking lot until he spotted Sara’s BMW. It was a stupid thing to do, but he was feeling pretty stupid lately anyway. She’d bypassed the doctors’ lot and found a spot in the back under a stand of shade trees. He suppressed the desire to get off his bike and touch the hood of her car. Will told himself it was only to see how long she’d been there, but deep down he knew he wanted some kind of connection.
Which was embarrassing and pathetic enough to make him gun the engine and proceed to the employee lot at an unadvisable speed.
Fortunately, burning some rubber in the parking lot was exactly the kind of thing his alter ego would do. Will had gone undercover before. He liked to think that he was pretty good at getting into character. There were some happily retired chickens in North Georgia who could attest to his skills. While busting a cockfighting ring was not as dangerous as his current assignment, the GBI’s information officers had managed to give Will an even more impressive cover this time around.
As with the day laborers outside the Home Depot, Will imagined that Bill Black, his cover ID, provided a glimpse into what could have been. The man was a con, the sort of guy who knew his way around the system. He had a sealed juvie record and a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force. More important, there were three serious charges on his adult sheet—two for knocking around various women and another for pushing a mall cop down an escalator.
The latter charge had landed Bill Black in the Fulton County jail for ninety days. He’d been paroled for good behavior, but was kept on a tight leash by a parole officer who reported directly back to Amanda. The PO had already dropped by the hospital a few times for surprise check-ins. Bill Black was a scary guy. There were other crimes that the cops were looking at him for. A gas station stickup. Some messy business up in Kentucky. An assault that left a man blind in one eye. Black was what those in the know called a person of interest.
The GBI had managed to locate a couple of snit
ches who were willing to back up Black’s cover story in exchange for leniency. Another con told Will all the gossip floating around the jail during the time in which Bill Black was incarcerated. The guards had confirmed the lurid details, which sounded like a mash-up of Cool Hand Luke and The Sopranos. Then they had taken some unflattering photos of Will holding up a placard with Black’s name and inmate number. Aside from the lack of any pathetic jailhouse tattoos, Will would’ve been hard-pressed to find the holes in his backstory.
Of course, there were always holes to be found, but Will wasn’t about to share the biggest one with Amanda: the name Bill Black, which Amanda had proudly presented to Will as if on a silver platter, made his brain feel like it belonged in a Salvador Dalí painting.
“Bill rhymes with Will,” she’d told him, handing over the dossier he was required to memorize. “And of course Black is a color.”
Will gathered from her demeanor that he was supposed to be grateful. The truth was, she might as well have thrown on a leotard and acted out the name in interpretive dance.
Will was dyslexic, a fact that Amanda only trotted out when she couldn’t find a sharper knife in her drawer. He wasn’t about to have an open conversation about his problem—that was what the Internet was for—but if Amanda had bothered to look it up, she would’ve realized dyslexia wasn’t a reading disorder, but a language-processing disorder. Which was why Will had no ear for rhymes and couldn’t understand how Black could be a color when the capital letter meant that it was a name.
But Will had sat in Amanda’s office and thumbed through Bill Black’s file like it made perfect sense.
“Looks good,” he’d told her.
She hadn’t been convinced. “You want me to help you with the big words?”
Will had closed the file and left her office.
He could read—he wasn’t a complete imbecile—but it took some time and a lot of patience. Over the years, Will had learned a few tricks to help him pass as more fluent. Holding a ruler under a line of text to keep the letters from jumping around. Using the computer to dictate his reports or read his emails. He’d been told in school that he read on a second-grade level. Not that his teachers had formally diagnosed him with anything other than stupidity. Will was in college when he finally learned that what he had was called dyslexia, but it was too late by then for him to do anything but pray to God that no one found out.
For the most part, not many people did. Amanda seemed happy to keep it as a weapon in her arsenal. Faith had discovered it during their first case, and whenever anything involving reading came up, she took on a maternal tone that made Will want to stick his head in a wood chipper.
And of course Sara knew. She’d figured it out immediately. Will guessed being a doctor helped her recognize the signs. The weird part was that she treated him no different from before. She saw his dyslexia as just another part of Will, like the color of his hair or the size of his feet.
She saw him as normal.
And if he kept revving his motorcycle, she’d look out the window and see him riding through the parking lot.
The irony was not lost on Will that he’d spent the last ten days hiding the truth from Sara only to find himself stuck not just in the same city, but in the same building dealing with basically the same people. He would do anything to have her back in Atlanta, where the lies flowed a lot easier. In Macon, there was the constant possibility that Will would turn a corner or open a door and find Sara standing there wanting answers.
He coasted the Triumph into his usual spot by the employee entrance. The rain had accompanied him most of the trip down from Atlanta, spitting fine needles into his face. Will’s helmet wasn’t the wraparound kind, but a shorty, which gave his head the minimum coverage allowed by law. It was closer to a beanie. Every time a large truck crowded him on the interstate, Will wondered if he’d actually be able to see his brains on the asphalt before he died or if death would be instantaneous.
The thought was not a new one. Will had ridden a Kawasaki in his twenties because the bike was cheap and gas was expensive. And it had to be said that the sensation of sitting atop a large, vibrating machine was not an unpleasant feeling for a young man with limited dating experience. Add another decade, and the story took a considerably darker tone. His back ached. His hands hurt. His shoulders were screaming. Other areas were equally displeased. Will shook out his legs as he got off the bike. He unbuckled his helmet and peeled it off his head.
“Hey, Bud,” a nurse called.
Will looked up. The woman was leaning against the building and sucking on a cigarette. He’d told people to call him Buddy because he didn’t want to recall his conversation with Amanda every time he heard Bill Black’s name. That his hospital colleagues had all shortened it to Bud was an unforeseen development.
She asked, “Good ride?”
Will grunted, which was a typical Bill Black response.
“That’s nice.” She smiled at him. Her bleach-blonde hair didn’t move in the breeze. Her tight pink scrubs were covered in leaping dolphins. “You hear about what happened last night with them two cops?”
“Yep.” Will pulled the bandanna off his head and used it to wipe the road from his face.
“One of ’em’s in the ICU. Might not wake up.” She picked something off the tip of her tongue. “Po-po’s crawling all over the place.”
Will grunted again. He stuck the bandanna in his back pocket.
She exhaled a long stream of smoke. “Tony says they were at his house this morning. Fools stole his car and used it for the hit. You believe that?”
Will stared at her, trying to decipher whether or not she was being rhetorical. He decided his best bet was to ignore the question altogether. “I need to clock in.”
He tucked his helmet under his arm as he walked toward the door. The nurse took a last hit off the cigarette. She didn’t seem to mind his gruffness. This was typical of the women in Bill Black’s social circle. They expected their men to be quiet, to grunt and glare and scratch and spit. For Will, who’d been trained to put the toilet seat back down before he was even out of diapers, it was like living on the moon.
Or utopia, depending on how you looked at it.
“Take care now,” the nurse said. She winked at Will as he opened the door. He didn’t bother to hold it open for her. He knew the woman’s type, had seen her standing in the periphery his entire life. They were at the children’s home. They were out in the streets. Oftentimes, they were in the back of a squad car. They chose the wrong guys, made all the wrong decisions. The worse you treated them, the tighter they held on.
Will had always known this type of woman found him attractive. Maybe it was the scars on his face. Maybe it was some invisible mark left by his childhood that only fellow travelers could see. Either way, they were drawn to Will because they thought he was damaged or dangerous or both. He had spent his life avoiding them. The only way to hold the interest of a desperate woman was to be a certain type of man. Will had never wanted to be that man.
“Hey,” the nurse called. She stood in the open doorway, hand on her hip. “It’s Cayla, by the way.”
Will stared at her. He was standing outside the employee locker room. She was thirty feet away. The gray dolphins on her shirt looked like spoiled sperm.
She gave a flirty smile. “Cayla with a C.”
Will didn’t think another grunt would travel. He tried to be clever. “You want me to write that down or something?”
“Sure do.” She laughed in a way that made him feel small. “Whatchu doin’ after work?”
He shrugged.
“Why don’t you come by my house for supper? I bet you ain’t had nothin’ home-cooked since you got out.”
Bill Black’s history had gotten around fast. Will had worked at the hospital less than two weeks and she already knew he’d been in jail.
She pressed, “How about it? Around seven? I can get a good scald on a chicken.”
Will hesitated. He knew C
ayla Martin’s name from her rap sheet, which showed an arrest for drunken driving four years ago. DUIs came with expensive fines. Cayla still had another thousand dollars to pay before she was allowed to do more than drive herself to and from work. She was also a pharmacy nurse, which meant she had access to all the pills that kept getting stolen.
Cayla stamped her foot. “Come on, Bud. Let me cook you somethin’ good.”
Will was contemplating his options when Tony Dell came out of the locker room. The man panicked. His sneakers squeaked against the floor as he tripped over his feet trying to flee.
Con or cop—it didn’t matter. When someone was trying to get away from you, you stopped them. Will dropped his helmet on the floor. He grabbed Tony by the back of the neck and slammed him face-first into the door.
“Hey!” Tony cried. He was a little guy. Will was almost a foot and a half taller and carried at least fifty pounds more muscle. Lifting Tony off his feet was as easy as lifting Sara.
Will made his voice a growl. “What the fuck did you get me into?”
“I didn’t—” Tony tried. Obviously, it was difficult for him to talk with his face smashed against a door. “Come on, Bud! I was tryin’ to hook you up!”
“I’ll hook you to a fucking noose.”
“Bud! I’m serious, dude. I didn’t know!” His toes kicked at the door as he tried to find purchase. “Come on!”
Will let him go. Tony’s feet slid back to the floor. He took a few seconds to collect himself. He was breathing hard. Sweat poured from his brow, but whether that was because he was high or terrified, Will wasn’t sure. Regardless, now that Tony wasn’t afraid of having his neck snapped, he took umbrage with the rough treatment. “Jesus, dude. What’s wrong with you?”
Will demanded, “Who set up the job?”
Tony looked up and down the hallway to make sure they were alone. Cayla had vanished. Women like that knew when to get out of the way.
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