Wash Her Feet novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: A Brother Who Died

I did not sleep for two nights, and on Wednesday afternoon I went to the children's ward to ask Shelby one question.

I wanted a room full of people when I asked it.

Shelby had always been safest in a crowd, so I decided to use hers.

"I'll wait by the elevators," Rafe said in the lobby. "If she sees me first, she'll run."

"If she sees you at all, she'll cry," I said.

"Then she cries." His eyes were on the floor numbers. "Say it the way you'd ask about the weather."

I rode up alone, with my feet still wrapped under my sneakers.

The ward was bright and loud with cartoons.

It was shift change, and parents were everywhere, in plastic chairs and in doorways, holding coffee and coloring books.

Shelby stood behind the nurses' station in lavender scrubs, writing on a chart, with a small boy in a bathrobe leaning on her hip.

She looked up and saw me.

Her whole face softened.

"Hallie," she said, and she came around the desk with her arms open. "Oh, sweetheart. You came."

She hugged me, and for a second I let her.

She smelled of hand soap and lemon, as she always had, and my body remembered sixteen years of it.

Then I stepped back.

"I have a question," I said, in the weather voice. "Do you have a brother?"

A few parents nearby glanced over.

Shelby kept her smile, but it thinned.

"Hal, we talked about this. That man is not well, and he's confusing you."

"I'm not asking about him," I said. "I'm asking about you. Do you have a brother?"

I took the photograph out of my jacket and set it on the counter.

A skinny boy with his hand on a little girl's shoulder.

Shelby looked at it for a long time.

The small boy in the bathrobe tugged her scrub top, and she put a hand on his head without looking down.

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