Chapter 4: The File

"He's the one," Halle said.

She was standing over my bed at seven in the morning in her scrubs, with a stethoscope around her neck and a cup of the clinic's terrible coffee.

"Who?" I said.

"There's a man's sweatshirt under your bed, Thea, and it's the same gray as the team ones.

"And you have the face of a woman who got what she needed."

She was twenty, a nursing major from Duluth with short red-brown curls and a freckled, unimpressed face.

She was the only person at Halden who had said anything to me in the first five days that wasn't about a class.

"It was a one-time thing," I said.

"Mm-hm."

"He doesn't know about, about the other."

Halle looked at me over the rim of her cup.

"What other?" she said.

I had not told her, so I shook my head.

She took in my face, and then she sat on the end of my bed.

"Whatever it is, I'm on night shift for six more weeks, and I don't snore," she said.

"You can tell me when you want."

"Thank you," I said.

"And Thea?"

"What?" I said.

"If he hurts you, I know where the clinic keeps the big needles."

I laughed.

It was the first time I'd laughed in four months.

At eleven I went to the library and sat down in the north reading room, at the long oak table by the window.

It had a little brass plate set into its end.

KVALE FAMILY READING TABLE, 1974.

I laid out my biology text and a legal pad and began to read.

The room was full.

Eight or nine students looked up, and I felt it travel through them, a low hush.

Two rowers in team jackets at the far end of the table picked up their things and moved to another one.

I turned a page.

At twenty past eleven the door opened.

I did not look up.

I felt the room go quiet.

His shoes crossed the floor.

He stopped at the end of the table, and I made myself read the same sentence for the third time.

"Move," Aksel said.

He didn't say it loud, but the room heard.

"No."