Chapter 9: Ask Them Where You Were

Nolan drove me to Harlow General without a word and parked across two spaces at the emergency entrance.

"I'll wait in the corridor," he said.

"I don't need a bodyguard."

"I know," he said. "I'm not one."

I left him in the hall with his arm in a fresh sling and went in alone.

Fergus lay in a narrow bed by the window with a clear mask over his face.

His beard looked whiter than it had on Tuesday, and his hands lay open on the sheet.

I had never seen those hands lie still.

"Roz," he said, and pulled the mask down with a shaking finger.

"Put that back."

"Not yet." He coughed, a long wet sound that went on too long. "You're at their house."

"Since Tuesday."

"They told you what, exactly?"

"That they lost me," I said. "That they searched for nineteen years."

He closed his eyes.

"That's the story," he said. "That's what I let them tell."

"Fergus."

"I took you in because your father owed me a debt, and I never forgave myself for how he paid it."

I stared at him.

"What debt?"

"Not today," he said, and his fingers found my wrist. "You don't hit a man who's dying. You'll want to hit me."

"Nobody is dying."

"I am," he said. "Not this week, probably. Soon."

The monitor beside him beeped steadily.

I did not have a single line ready.

He had taught me to count a shipment and to tell a lying captain from a drunk one, and he had never once taught me how to be quiet at this bedside.

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