Chapter 5: Both Hands

Donovan came to the emergency room at two in the morning on Tuesday.

I saw him through the glass of the triage station.

He stood in the waiting area in a plain gray coat with his hands in his pockets.

He had been discharged that afternoon.

He had no driver, no phone in his hand and nobody beside him.

A woman with a split lip looked up at him and moved one seat away.

I finished charting a drunk driver's blood pressure and told the charge nurse I was taking my break early.

She looked at him and then at me.

"That's the husband," she said.

"For now," I said.

I took him through the staff door into the break room.

It had a bad couch, a microwave and a calendar from a pharmacy.

He didn't sit.

"Where were you standing?" I said.

"Kate."

"On Saturday, when they carried me past the doors. Where were you standing?"

"At the head table," Donovan said. "Next to my father."

"You had two hands free."

"I know."

"Thirty feet. You looked straight at me, and you didn't move."

He took his left hand out of his pocket and pushed back his cuff.

The bruise on his wrist had gone yellow at the edges, four fingers wide.

"He took hold of me when the doors opened," Donovan said. "He said, 'Let them do it, they only want to scare her.'"

"I've never pulled away from him in my life. I didn't know how."

"That's not an excuse."

"No," he said. "I'm not offering it as one."

He kept looking at me when he said it, and he didn't ask me to take it back.

I had expected him to.

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