Chapter 22: Her Hands, Healed

The boots on the roof belonged to two officers and a paramedic.

Camille went with them to a hospital hold, and Hayes took Duchess.

I gave her phone to the state investigator before midnight.

By Friday every file on it had been copied, and Camille was charged.

The nurse took the last of the gauze off my hands at four on Friday afternoon.

The skin underneath was pink and shiny and tight, and I could close both fists.

I turned my palms over in the clinic light and could not stop staring at them.

Hayes was waiting on the clinic steps with his hands in his pockets.

"Let me see," he said.

I held them out.

He took them in his and looked at them for a long, silent minute, with his thumbs resting very lightly on my wrists.

"They're beautiful," he said.

"They're scarred."

"They carried her down a road," he said. "They flew a plane to Napa. They're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

I drove us back to the hangar myself.

I put my bare hands on the wheel for the first time in a month and felt every thread of the leather.

In the crew room I locked the door and turned around.

He was standing by the bed with his jacket already off.

"You said silent," I said.

"I did. I'm keeping the rule."

"I'm lifting it."

He looked at me.

"Talk to me," I said. "Tonight I want all of it. I want to hear what you want."

His breath went out of him.

"Come here, then," he said.

I crossed the room and put both hands flat on his chest, without gauze, and felt his skin.

It was the first time I'd touched him with my whole palm, and it nearly dropped me.

He kissed me.

It wasn't careful.

His mouth took mine, hot and deep, and his hands went into my hair, and I held onto his shirt with both fists because I finally could.

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