They Buried My Mother Quietly, So I Married the Son She Saved novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Operating Room Four

For six nights after the storm I slept in my own room with the connecting door shut.

I told myself I was being careful.

What I was doing was hiding.

I could not lie beside him with the notebook in my cardigan and four hundred thousand dollars in my head.

On the seventh night I went out at eleven, in sneakers and a dark sweater, and took the green Subaru to Corliss Memorial.

The basement corridor behind the loading dock was empty and smelled of bleach.

At the very end of it stood a steel door with a chain wrapped three times through its handle.

The padlock was the size of my fist.

A stenciled sign said B-WING. NO ENTRY. STRUCTURAL.

I put my palm flat on the steel.

It was cold.

"I thought so," said a voice behind me.

I turned around too fast.

Rafe stood at the end of the corridor in his coat, still in his work suit, with his hands pushed into his pockets.

His face was white and tight.

"Who is he?" he said.

"What?" I said.

"The man you're meeting. You've gone out every night this week. You come back at two with your hair wet. You sleep in that room as if there's a wall in the bed. I'm not an idiot, Megan."

"There's no man," I said.

"Then why are you in a basement at midnight?"

"Term four," I said. "You don't ask which doors."

"I never agreed not to follow."

"That's lawyering."

"It's exactly lawyering. I own seven hospitals and I've spent a week telling myself you have a right to your reasons." He took one step toward me. "I'm done with that. I'm not your patient."

"I never said you were."

"You check my dressing. You take my pulse. You ask how I slept. In bed, you were somewhere else the entire time, and then you left, and you've been gone ever since."

The corridor hummed.

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