Chapter 16: What He Sees

I gave Dr. Lowry one tube that night, in her lab, because I wanted to be the one who held the needle.

That was the whole point.

For ten years someone had drawn my blood and told me where it went.

Now I sat on the stool with my sleeve rolled and said, "One tube. Then I decide if there's a second."

"One tube," Dr. Lowry said, and she meant it.

She tied the band around my arm.

My hand started to shake before the needle came near.

It was the smell of the alcohol swab, sharp and clean, the smell of every first Monday of my life.

My mother's thumb was on my vein.

My mother was saying, Good girl.

"Ivy."

Rafe had pulled a second stool up on my other side, close enough that his knee touched mine.

He did not take my hand.

He held his own out flat on his thigh, palm up, and left it there.

"Your hands do the asking," he said quietly.

I laid my fingers in his.

He did not squeeze.

He just held on, warm and heavy and steady, while the needle went in.

The tube filled dark red.

I watched it, and I breathed in for four and out for six, and my own voice from the stage was in my head: you don't have to do it.

I did not have to.

I was doing it.

When Dr. Lowry capped the tube and pressed gauze to the crook of my arm, I realized my face was wet.

Rafe thumbed it dry once, quickly, with a plain rough gentleness.

"You did great," he said.

"I did nothing."

"You sat in a chair on purpose. That's a lot."

Dr. Lowry carried the tube away to her bench, and I leaned my head against his shoulder for exactly one breath.

I stood up to get my jacket and heard her voice from the back room, low, talking to a colleague on the phone.

"She's the best line I've ever seen, and I need three more tubes by the weekend, at least, if there are going to be patients..."

"Dr. Lowry."

Rafe's voice came from just behind me.

I had not heard him leave the stool.

He stood in the doorway of the back room, very tall, and I had never heard that tone from him, flat and dangerous.

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