Chapter 18: The Ward

My floor held its Christmas party on the third of January, because half the staff had worked the real one.

Marcy had called me the night before.

"They're saying things about you," she said. "That you ran off with a gangster. That you're on some list. Come, June. Let them look at your face."

So I flew back to Denver in a borrowed coat, with two of Marcello's men waiting in a car outside the ER bay.

I took the elevator to the fourth floor.

The staff lounge smelled of coffee and sugar cookies, and somebody had hung a string of paper snowflakes across the window.

Thirty nurses and techs stood around a table of food.

They saw me, and the talk fell off.

I put down my bag.

"Hi," I said. "I'm not dead, and I'm not on a list."

A tech near the door laughed with relief, and then clapped her hand over her mouth.

The charge nurse, a tall woman with reading glasses on a chain, crossed the room and hugged me hard.

"Honey," she said. "We were so worried."

Marcy came out of the corner and stood at my elbow.

She had cut her curls short since the mountain.

"You came," she said.

"I said I'd call you. I'm calling in person."

Then the door opened again.

Two women walked in together, close, with their eyes lowered.

The friend whose mother I had nursed through chemo.

The friend I had lent six thousand four hundred dollars.

They had been telling the floor what happened for a week.

I could tell, because everyone's eyes slid to them and away.

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