Chapter 8: The Ward

Gabe's ten-year-old Civic had a cracked dashboard and a bumper sticker that said I BRAKE FOR PI, and he drove it as fast as it would go.

"You don't have to come," I said.

"I'm your sidekick," he said, eyes on the road. "It's in the contract."

We got to Briarwood Regional a little before midnight.

Mrs. Hartigan was waiting in the second-floor corridor in her work cardigan, with her car keys still in her fist.

She saw me and her whole face broke.

I did not know what to do, so I held out my arms.

She walked into them and cried against my shoulder, and I stood there while a nurse pushed a cart past us.

"They pumped her stomach," she said into my jacket. "She's asleep. They said she'll be okay. They said it so many times."

"Okay."

"She almost wasn't."

Gabe took her arm, steered her gently to a plastic chair, and put his own coat over her knees.

Then he went to find coffee, and I understood why I had picked him.

I looked through the window of Room 214.

Erin lay in the bed with a tube taped to her hand and her red hair spread across the pillow.

Her face was the color of paper.

I had never seen her that color in either life.

I turned away and sat down in the chair by her bed, and I did not move for a long time.

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