Chapter 13: The Photo

Morven read the text twice and set the phone face down on my chest.

"She was on our sidewalk," she said.

"Apparently."

"At eleven at night. In December."

"She likes to be thorough."

Morven laughed, once, and then she did not.

She sat up with the sheet around her and pulled her braid over her shoulder.

"That photo is going somewhere," she said. "Not just to you."

I had not thought of it yet.

I thought of it now, and the phone buzzed again on my ribs.

It was my mother's number, with a brief message:

Call me. Not the lawyer. Me.

I did not call her before dawn.

I lay awake instead, with Morven asleep against my side, and listened to the house tick as the heat came on.

By six, the photo had reached the staff group chat.

By six-thirty, it had reached three members of the board and the reporter who had been in the ER lobby.

Morven showed me her phone in the kitchen, over a pot of coffee I had made badly.

Under the picture someone had typed: Is this the ER chief??

Under that, a second person had typed: Is that Hallett's hand in her hair?

"Okay," Morven said. "I'm going in."

"Wait. Let me call my mother, and the hospital counsel."

"Nolan." She put her mug down. "I have a shift at seven, and fourteen people on that chat work for me."

"That's why I want to think about what you say."

"I know exactly what I'm going to say."

I drove her.

Her hatchback was still in my driveway, and I did not want her walking in alone.

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