Chapter 16: Going Home

I walked past Brad on my way to the elevators.

He was still holding his keys.

"Heidi."

I stopped.

"Did she always..." He couldn't finish it.

"I don't know, Brad. You're the one who was at her house every Sunday."

He looked at the revolving door, where she'd gone.

"Room nine," I said. "You know where it is."

The elevator came.

He didn't get on it.

Upstairs, Matt was asleep sitting up in the visitor's chair, his reading glasses on his head and Clara's joke book open on his chest.

Clara was wide awake.

"He fell asleep in the middle of the cookie one," she said. "That's rude."

I gave her the card and the pink striped candle.

She read the card twice, slowly, moving her lips.

"Caden wrote this?"

"He took a bus by himself to bring it."

She held the candle for a long time.

"Okay," she said finally. "He can be forgiven."

She put the candle in her pajama pocket and kept it there for seventeen days.

Caden's grandmother got emergency custody of him that Friday.

The detective called on Monday to say Caden had sat with a child interviewer for an hour and told her everything.

"It's his word now," she said. "Now I need the money."

Brad didn't come to room nine.

He didn't call.

On Thursday, April 23, day plus forty-one, Clara went home.

Her doctor signed the papers at nine and shook her hand.

"Masks in public. No crowds. No dogs licking your face. Clinic twice a week," he said. "And no more fevers. I mean it."

"I'll try," Clara said. "But I can't promise for my blood."

The day nurses had decorated her door with paper crowns.

When we stepped out of room nine, the whole hall was lined up.

Nurses. Parents in masks. The girl who only ate pink things in her taped crown.

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