Chapter 9: Hands

By Sunday night, Beatrice had changed every lock in the east wing.

She had fired the agency and hired a new nurse through a doctor she had known for twenty years.

She had put my grandmother in a bright ground-floor room with a hospital bed and a woman to turn her every two hours.

Grandma had looked around at the flowers and the window seat and said, "Well. This is the first time anyone in your family has apologized to me."

Beatrice had laughed until she cried.

Then she had gone to bed, and I had gone upstairs to give her son a bath.

I did it myself.

Nobody was allowed in the room but me, and I didn't mind.

I drew the screen around the bed, warmed the water, and rolled back the sheet.

Damian's body had gone thin in three months in bed, but it was still broad across the shoulders.

He had a long scar down his left thigh from the accident, and a dark patch of old bruise on his hip.

I told myself he was a patient.

I had washed a hundred patients.

I wet the cloth and started at his collarbone.

Oh, he thought.

I kept my face still.

Her hands, he thought, and the thought wasn't clinical. God, her hands. Don't stop. Don't you dare stop.

My own hands stopped.

"Sorry," I said, to the room, in my professional voice. "Water's a little cool?"

I hadn't asked for an answer.

Don't you dare make it warmer. This is the first thing I've felt in three months that wasn't a needle.

I washed his chest slowly, and then each arm, and the curve of his ribs.

I washed the hollow beneath his jaw, where his pulse ran fast.

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