Chapter 13: Tonight

Conall drove the forty minutes down the mountain in twenty-six, with my hand in his the whole way.

I lay on my stomach across the back seat, and Penny held my head steady on her knees.

The pain had settled into a hot, bright point between my shoulder blades.

Every time the truck hit a rut, the point moved a little, and I stopped being able to feel my toes.

"Talk to me," Penny said. "Say anything."

"Conall," I said into the seat cushion. "Ask me something."

"What?"

"Anything. Keep me here."

He thought about it for exactly one curve in the road.

"When you were a baker, at eight," he said. "What would you have made first?"

"Cinnamon bread. With the sugar crust."

"Then that's what I'm learning to make."

I laughed, and it hurt so badly that I saw white.

The surgeon was waiting at the doors in her scrubs, with her hair coming out of its cap.

She looked at me, then at Conall, and then at the hand he would not let go of.

"The lobby," I said.

"No," Conall said. "Tonight I'm walking you as far as the doors."

I thought about the first surgery, and the lobby, and the ninety minutes.

"As far as the doors," I said.

He walked beside the gurney down a long green corridor, one hand on the rail.

At the double doors a nurse put a flat palm on his chest.

"This is as far as you go, sir."

"I know," he said. He bent down and put his forehead against mine.

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