We Called It Therapy After Dark novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Open Until Sunrise

Anja works her shift after the viral video, and on the loading dock Roan wipes the stage makeup off her cheek; then Siri walks into triage holding her stomach and asking for Anja.

I clocked in at eleven in my navy scrubs, with the green dress balled up in my locker.

The break room went quiet when I walked in.

Three nurses were standing around a phone propped against the coffee maker.

On its screen, a woman in a green dress was signing papers on a walnut desk.

Someone had already put a caption on it. "Wife signs divorce on live show. Queen behavior."

"Anja," said the charge nurse. "Go home. I mean it."

"I have nowhere to go until my grandmother changes the locks."

"Then sit in the break room and drink tea."

"I'd rather be useful."

She looked at me for a long moment and then handed me a chart.

"Bed six," she said. "Chest pain. Be nice to him, he's seventy."

I was nice to him.

I was nice to bed nine, who had a fishhook in his thumb.

I was nice to bed two, who wanted to tell me about the Vikings for twenty minutes.

Nobody mentioned the video.

At ten to three the ER went still.

I walked down the back hall and pushed through the steel door to the loading dock.

Roan was already there.

He sat on the top step in his green scrubs and a grey hospital hoodie.

Two paper cups of vending machine coffee stood beside him.

He did not say hello.

He picked up one cup and held it out.

I sat down next to him on the cold concrete and took it.

Two years ago I came out here to be alone.

I had worked a drowned boy out of a pickup that night, and I could not make my hands stop.

Roan was already on the step. He didn't ask what was wrong.

I had said, "This is cheaper than therapy."

He had looked at the lake and said, "Therapy after dark. Open until the sun comes up."

It had been a joke.

Then it was every slow night for two years.

Neither of us ever said the joke out loud in front of anyone at the hospital.

"I'm not going to ask you anything," Roan said now.

"Good."

"I watched about forty seconds of that video, and then I stopped, because it felt like reading your mail."

"You can watch it. Two million people have."

"I'm not two million people."

He turned his head and looked at my face.

"You've got something on your cheek."

"It's the stage makeup. Siri did it in the lobby with a sponge. I never wash it off right."

"Hold still."

He put his thumb against my cheekbone and drew it down in one slow stroke.

His thumb came away black.

He wiped it on his knee.

His hand stayed in the air between us a moment too long.

Then he put it in the pocket of the hoodie.

I looked at the lake so he wouldn't see my face.

My heart was going fast and I told myself it was the coffee.

"He took my notebooks," I said.

Roan did not move.

"The ones under my bed. All eleven."

"When?"

"This afternoon, while I was at work picking up my shift. He took them and nothing else."

"Why would he want those?"

"I don't know. They're nothing. They're just the stupid stuff I think at three in the morning."

"They're not stupid."

"You've never read them."

"No," Roan said. "But I've heard you say it."

He said it flatly, to the lake.

I waited for him to say more.

He picked at the lid of his coffee and said nothing.

"Roan."

"Hm."

"You went quiet when I said notebooks."

"It's three in the morning. I always go quiet."

That was true. It was also the first time in two years I could not tell whether I believed him.

Something heavy hit the steel door behind us.

We both turned.

A tech leaned out into the cold and held the door open with his shoulder.

"Dr. Avery, Anja. We have a walk-in at triage. She's asking for Anja by name."

I stood up, because that's what I do.

"Who is it?"

"Blonde, white as a sheet, holding her stomach," the tech said. "She says she's your friend."

I walked down the back hall with my coffee still in my hand.

Through the window in the triage door, I saw Siri in her cream silk blouse.

She was bent over the desk, holding her stomach with both hands.

She looked up and saw me.

"Anja," she said. "Please. It's the baby."

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