My Sister Stole My Husband novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Night Shift
On the ward, Peg and a dying patient's son notice Maeve's hands shaking, and Peg shows her Alexis wearing their grandmother's pearls.
Maeve worked the night shift on Thursday because she couldn't stand to sleep in that bed.
She had flipped the mattress and bought new sheets at six that morning, and she still couldn't lie down on it.
The palliative ward on the fourth floor was quiet at one a.m.
Peg Sullivan was at the nurses' station with her reading glasses on a cord and a crossword she wasn't doing.
Peg was fifty-four, a widow, and the only person on the ward who said exactly what she thought.
She looked at Maeve's face and then at Maeve's left hand.
"Where's your ring?"
"In my mother's coat pocket."
Peg put the pen down.
"Do I need to sit you in the supply closet and make you tell me, or can I get it here?"
"My husband was in my bed with Alexis yesterday."
Peg did not gasp.
She stood up, walked around the station and hugged Maeve hard enough to move her badge.
"On your anniversary," she said into Maeve's shoulder.
"I paid off his loans that morning."
"Oh, honey."
"Don't. If you're kind to me I'll start, and I have a man in room nine who needs his dose at one-thirty."
Peg let go and wiped under her glasses with one knuckle.
"I'll do the dose," she said. "You sit down."
"I can do my own dose."
"You can do it after you sit down."
Maeve sat for four minutes.
Then she went to room nine.
The man in the bed was seventy-eight, a retired ferry deckhand, and he had stopped eating on Monday.
Nobody had come to see him in eleven days.
His son had signed the paperwork, left a phone number, and disappeared.
Maeve had sat with the old man through most of those nights, because nobody should have to listen to a ward alone.
She checked his pulse and turned the pillow.
"Maeve," the old man said without opening his eyes. "You look tired."
"So do you."
"I'm dying. I'm allowed."
She laughed, and the laugh had a crack in it.
Behind her, the door opened.
A big man stood in the light from the corridor, still wearing a navy work jacket that smelled of diesel and the harbor.
His hair was red-brown, and it needed cutting.
He was carrying two paper cups of coffee.
Maeve recognized him from the photograph on his father's bedside table.
"You're Niall," she said.
"I am."
"It's been eleven days."
"I know." He didn't look away. "I know exactly how long it's been."
He crossed to the bed and stood there, and for a moment he seemed too large for the room.
His father opened one eye. "Took you long enough," the old man said.
"I'm sorry, Da."
"Don't be sorry. Sit."
Niall sat in the visitor's chair.
He held out one of the coffees to Maeve over the bed rail.
"It's from the machine on the ground floor. I'm told it's terrible."
"It is."
"I bought it anyway."
She took it, because her hands wanted something to hold.
Her fingers were shaking, and the coffee slopped over the lip of the cup.
Niall looked at her hands, and then at her face.
He didn't say anything.
He set his own cup on the windowsill, took a clean napkin from his jacket pocket and wiped her wrist.
It took him two seconds.
His hand was warm, and rough with rope and weather, and he let go before she could decide how she felt about it.
"Long night?" he asked.
"A long week."
"Do you want to sit with him for a minute? I'll watch the door."
"That's my job."
"I know," said Niall. "I'm only offering."
His father snorted from the bed.
"Let him," he said. "He needs something to do with himself."
Maeve sat down in the second chair, carefully, with the coffee in both hands.
For ten minutes nobody said anything.
The old man slept again.
The machines kept their small, steady count.
And Maeve felt something she had not felt since noon on Wednesday, which was that for a few minutes nobody needed her to be strong.
At two-fifteen, Peg appeared in the doorway and cleared her throat.
"Maeve. A word."
Maeve got up and followed her into the corridor.
Peg held out her phone.
"I wasn't going to show you tonight," she said. "But you'd hear about it from somebody who isn't me."
It was a company page for Ashgrove Group, posted an hour ago.
The picture was a table of smiling people at a charity luncheon, and Waylon was at the center of it with his arm around a dark-haired woman in a plum-colored dress.
The caption read: Waylon Mercer and his family, supporting the Harbor Fund.
Alexis was smiling at the camera.
Around her neck was a long strand of pearls.
Maeve knew the pearls.
They had belonged to her grandmother, who had left them to Maeve and to nobody else.
They had been in a velvet box in the top drawer of Maeve's dresser when she left for her walk on Wednesday.
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