Chapter 21: Hospital Corridor

Keir's POV

I rode in the ambulance because Lena did, and she rode because the paramedic asked who the physician on scene was.

"Neurosurgery," she said, and climbed in without looking at me.

I climbed after her on my crutches, and nobody told me to get out.

Adelaide lay on the stretcher with an oxygen mask over her face.

Her skin was grey-yellow under the cabin light.

Her eyes were open, and they went from Lena to me, and back to Lena.

"Don't speak, Mrs. Ashgrove," the paramedic said.

Lena sat at the head of the stretcher, with two fingers on the pulse in Adelaide's neck.

She did it steadily, without a word.

I understood that she would have done the same for any stranger, and that Adelaide would never understand it.

The siren went on the whole length of Michigan Avenue.

I watched Lena's face in the white light of the cabin.

I had spent four months waiting for this woman to fall, and I had thought I'd feel something close to joy.

I felt a cold, flat fury, and under it a fear I did not want.

Lena wasn't looking at the woman. She was looking at the monitor.

"Is she dying?" I asked quietly.

"Not tonight," Lena said. "Tonight is her kidneys."

At Northwestern, a team took Adelaide through a pair of double doors.

A nephrologist came out twenty minutes later, a tall woman with a clipboard and tired eyes.

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