Chapter 6: Emergency Contact

The doctor took me and Millie into a small room with a box of tissues on the table.

"Her heart is failing," he said. "It's exactly the condition she had three years ago. I can't explain how she was stable in between."

"What can you do?" Millie asked.

"Put her on the transplant list. Monitor her. Keep her calm." He rubbed his eyes. "I'd say days, Mr. Treharne. Not the months we gave her before."

Days.

I thought of the timer in the corner of my eye and kept my face still.

"Who's listed as next of kin?" I asked.

"That's you. You're the emergency contact on every form we have."

"We're divorced."

"The paperwork was never updated." He looked at his chart. "She didn't change it."

I sat with that for a second.

I had never checked that form in six years.

By midnight the corridor outside her room was quiet except for the machines.

I had a plastic chair and a paper cup of coffee, and Millie had gone to move her truck.

Then the elevator opened, and Brody came down the hall with his phone raised.

Jocelyn walked a pace behind him with her tablet, and a man with a shoulder camera behind her.

"Hey, guys," Brody said into the lens, in a low, worried voice. "We're at the hospital. Our girl is not okay. Please send love."

He stopped at the nurses' station.

"Margot Treharne," he said. "I'm her fiancé."

The nurse at the desk didn't look up from her screen.

"Family only after ten, sir."

"I am family."

"What's your relationship to the patient?"

"I'm her fiancé. We're getting married Monday."

The nurse typed something and turned the screen toward Jocelyn.

"Is the patient's name on the form?" Jocelyn asked smoothly.

"The patient's emergency contact is Nolan Treharne, spouse."

"Ex-spouse," Brody said. "They're divorced. It's in the news."

The nurse looked past him down the hall at me.

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