Vanessa looked through the window at the ambulances parked near the entrance. "Who signed off on the fuel assembly?" she asked. This time the silence lasted longer. "I'm not sure what you're getting at," Ron said. "That was one of Carter's old obsessions. He wasn't qualified to diagnose the engineering systems."
"He was qualified enough to pull Tommy out," Vanessa replied. Ron's voice hardened. "Vanessa, I understand you're frightened. But don't let a disgruntled former employee make this into an accusation. He's the last person who should be influencing your understanding of what happened."
Vanessa looked toward Eli's curtain. "I'm not asking him to tell me what to believe," she said. "I'm asking why nobody told me what he documented."
Ron offered to come to the hospital. She told him not yet. After hanging up, Vanessa stood very still and realized that for years she had treated Ron's objections as evidence that he was protecting her time. Tonight, his objections sounded suspiciously like he was protecting something else.
The nurse found her a chair beside Tommy's bed, where she sat holding his uninjured hand until he drifted into an exhausted sleep. At one point he opened his eyes and whispered, "Mom, I was calling for you." Vanessa bent closer. "I know, baby."
Tommy shook his head. "I didn't think anybody could hear. Then Eli did. He said my name before he opened the door."
She kissed his forehead and said nothing. Her son did not know he had described the most important difference between the man who saved him and the men who had signed his company's safety papers. One had listened carefully enough to hear a frightened child through rain and metal. The others had found reasons to stop listening to a mechanic who was trying to warn them.
Eli spent most of that night wishing he could go home. His burn hurt whenever he moved, and the medical staff wanted to make sure he had not suffered a serious inhalation injury. He called Sophie from the bed with his phone propped against a water pitcher. Helen's living room lamp glowed behind her, and Sophie appeared on the screen clutching a stuffed fox with one ear missing.
"I heard you saved somebody," she said. Eli looked at her enormous eyes and hated that she had already heard something frightening. "I helped a boy get out of a vehicle," he told her. "The firefighters came and did the rest. I'm at the hospital so the doctors can look at my arm."
Sophie stared at the bandage he briefly showed her. "Is it because of the unsafe truck?" she asked.
He could not answer that yet. "They don't know what caused the fire," he said. "People who understand these things are going to check. The important part is that the boy is safe, and I'm coming home."
Sophie pressed her lips together. "Did you think about me?" Eli felt something tighten behind his ribs. "Yes," he said. "Before I ran toward him, and when I was helping him, and after. I was thinking about you the whole time."