Chapter 9: The X-Ray

I didn't sleep.

At six I was sitting on the end of the bed in his shirt, watching him breathe.

At six-fifteen he opened his eyes.

"There's something in your chest," I said.

He didn't ask what I meant.

That was how I knew I was right.

"It's a sound on each heartbeat," I went on. "It wasn't there yesterday. Something has shifted, and you know exactly what."

"Sabine."

"The first day I made you sign a clause. Without argument."

He closed his eyes.

"That was about the wound."

"This is the wound. Show me the films."

He lay still so long that I thought he'd refuse.

Then he sat up, wincing, and opened the drawer of his nightstand.

He took out a small brass key.

"Desk, bottom left," he said. "Under the ledgers."

I went down the stairs to the long oak desk.

The drawer held an envelope from a private cardiac clinic.

Inside was a film.

I held it to the window.

A pale ribcage floated on the dark.

Below the left collarbone, a bright white thing the size of a grain of rice sat against the shadow of his heart.

Not near it.

On the wall of it.

There was a typed page clipped to the film.

Fragment lodged at the epicardial surface of the left ventricle.

Surgical removal carries a forty percent mortality risk.

Recommend delay while stable. Fragment may migrate. Reassess in ninety days.

I read it three times.

Then I sat down on the floor with my back against the desk, because my legs had gone.

Boots on the stairs.

Jude stood in the doorway in his shirt, one hand on the frame.

"It was five weeks ago," he said. "Crowe's men, outside the old docks."

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