Chapter 21: The Chair Bed

Colt's POV

By midnight the lobby was empty, and the old unit across the hall was dark.

The officers had walked Camille out through the front doors at half past eight with her hands behind her.

She had not said a word to anyone after the first sentence, which was "I want my lawyer."

The donors had stayed until the last folding chair was stacked, because Della had asked them to.

Then I asked the night charge nurse a question I had not known I would ask.

"Is room fourteen still there?"

"For three more weeks," she said. "They start taking out the walls on the fifteenth."

"May I sit in it?"

She looked at me for a long moment over her glasses.

"It's your room," she said. "You paid for the paint."

Fourteen was where Junie had spent ninety-seven days.

The crib had been wheeled out, and the monitors were gone.

There was a cinderblock wall with no window, a sink, a floor drain, and the vinyl chair-bed in the corner that Della had slept in for most of them.

I had never sat in it.

I sat down now and it creaked under me, and I put my bandaged hand on my knee.

My lawyer had left a folder on the seat.

I opened it and read it through twice by the light of my phone.

It was two documents.

The first resigned me as chairman of the hospital board, effective now, and gave my seat to a council elected by the donors.

The second gave the ten million dollars I had paid in, every cent, to that council, with no name attached to it, no plaque and no stone.

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