Chapter 15: St. Brigid's

I swore I would not follow him, and I was in the car before the swearing finished.

Oz stayed on the line from the kitchen, reading me the cameras in a flat voice.

"The bus let him off at St. Brigid's at 6:20 in the morning. He's been sitting on a bench by the ambulance bay ever since."

"And the van?"

"Across the lot. Two men, engine off."

"They're waiting for something."

"So is he," Oz said.

I parked on the third level of the garage and took the stairs two at a time.

The lobby was the same lobby, with the same sliding doors and the same pale floor.

I walked through it with my hood up and my pulse in my teeth.

On the fourth floor the elevator opened onto the cardiac ward.

It smelled like floor cleaner and old grief.

My father's room had been the third on the left, bed nine, and there was a new family in it now, a woman asleep in the chair.

I stopped at the corner before the nurses' station, because I had heard his voice.

It was Jonas.

Both the day shift and the night shift stood in front of him, because it was seven o'clock in the morning and they were handing over.

There were six nurses, a man in a green jacket, and a chaplain with a cardigan buttoned wrong.

He had taken off the cap.

His stitches showed, and the bruise on his cheek, and he held his cast against his chest.

"My name is Jonas Wray," he said.

"I'm not a patient and I'm not here to cause trouble. I came to tell you something I should have said four years ago."

A nurse with gray in her braid folded her arms.

"On October eleventh, 2022, I wrote the program that cut the power to this hospital," Jonas said.

"I was told it was a test. It wasn't. Your generators were told to stay off, and I wrote that instruction."

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