Chapter 15: Where People Can Hear

We reached the ICU at ten past three in the morning.

Roxanne was standing outside the glass with her forehead against it.

Behind the glass, her mother lay under a tangle of tubes with a monitor drawing a jagged line above her head.

"They moved her at midnight," Roxanne said without turning. "Her white count fell. Her fever came back."

"After the chapel," I said.

"Eighteen hours after I told you." She turned, and her face was gray.

"I said it out loud, and she's taking her back."

Elias stood a step behind me with his hands in his pockets.

He didn't say anything, and I was glad.

My phone buzzed in my hand.

It was a text from Dane Whitlow, who had never once texted me before this week.

I slept all night. First time in two weeks. I woke up in my own bed. Is that what saying it does?

I read it twice.

Then I held the screen up to Roxanne.

"Dane stood up in front of ninety people yesterday morning and said what he did," I said. "Last night he didn't walk."

"He gave the seat back."

"He gave it back because he said it first."

"Jo, Dane isn't a mother with a daughter on a ventilator."

"Your mother isn't on a ventilator," I said, harder than I meant to.

"Her numbers dropped, and you've told one person. In a chapel, at four in the morning, with nobody else there."

"So?"

"So I don't think the rule is that you tell. Corinna said it on the roof."

"What did she say?"

"You're the first one who has told me what you did."

Roxanne stared at me.

"She wasn't punishing you for confessing," I said. "She was waiting for you to do it properly."

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