Chapter 6: Brookhaven

The text came at ten forty that night, from a number I didn't know.

It said: Brookhaven, Beavercreek. Room 4. A nurse lent me her phone. Please.

I read it in the bathroom with the fan on, while Grady brushed his teeth ten feet away.

I wrote back: Stay in the room. I'm coming.

Then I sent the number to Marshall, and I stood in the doorway of our bedroom and told my husband a lie.

"My mother's having a bad night," I said. "The home called. I need to go sit with her."

Grady spat into the sink and looked at me in the mirror.

For half a second I saw him weigh it.

"I'll drive you."

"She's confused around you. She thinks you're my father."

"Cor, it's eleven."

"She's my mother, Grady."

He wiped his mouth on a hand towel.

"Text me when you get there," he said. "And when you leave. I worry."

It was a very good sentence.

I texted him from the Willow Run parking lot, where I stopped for a moment with the engine off.

Then I drove two blocks to a closed pharmacy, where a gray Subaru was waiting under the only streetlight.

Marshall Breckenridge got out and held my car door for me.

He had a leather folder under one arm and a jacket over a collarless shirt, and his eyes were red.

"Leave your car here," he said. "If he tracks it, it stays at a pharmacy."

"I'll leave it."

"I'll drive."

We were in Beavercreek in twenty-five minutes.

Brookhaven turned out to be a long, low building with a gravel drive and window boxes that someone watered at night.

The woman at the front desk had the practiced smile of a person paid to have it.