Chapter 5: The Sickroom

I hung the door back on its hinges before dawn and walked out through the front of it.

Nobody stopped me.

The house was asleep, and I still knew every stair that creaked.

My grandmother's rooms were in the east wing, behind a pair of white doors.

I had been told I could see her alone before anyone else spoke to her.

I did not trust that, so I went in without knocking.

A nurse dozed in a chair by the window with a magazine on her lap.

I stepped past her and stopped at the foot of a high bed.

Constance Thornquist lay propped on four pillows with a clear tube under her nose.

She was smaller than I remembered, with white hair pinned up and thin hands folded on the blanket.

Her eyes were exactly the same.

They were blue, and sharp, and they went straight through me.

"You're late," she said.

Her voice was dry and thin.

"I was told you were dying, Grandmother."

"I am. But I wasn't going to do it without seeing you first."

She lifted one hand off the blanket, and it shook.

"Come here. Let me look."

I crossed the room and put my hand in hers.

She turned it over and ran a thumb across my knuckles.

The skin there was thick and cracked and white with old scar tissue.

"Fists," she said.

"Yes."

"Good ones?"

"Thirty-one wins."

The corner of her mouth moved.

"Your father would choke," she said.

"My father has been telling the whole state that I died of a fever."

"I know what he has been telling the state."

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