“Mercy Ridge Medical Center,” Wade said. “East lot. 6:15.”
“We’ll be there.”
Wade walked back into room 14 and sat down, and for a while he didn’t say anything either. Because some situations only required a person to stay in the chair. He’d learned that a long time ago, in a county-hospital waiting room he didn’t let himself think about often.
He thought about it now. Briefly. And let it go.
6:22. Derek Holt arrived.
Wade heard him before he saw him. Footsteps in the corridor with a particular quality. Deliberate and unhurried. The walk of a man who’d spent years moving through spaces that adjusted themselves to accommodate him.
He appeared in the doorway and got his first look at the room.
Derek was thirty-eight. Broad through the shoulders. Close-cropped hair going gray at the sides. Eyes the flat pale blue of a sky with no weather in it. Canvas jacket, Holt Construction stitched on the breast. Dark work pants. Boots with dried concrete on the toes. He looked like a foreman. He looked, in fact, perfectly ordinary.
He saw Wade and stopped. The expression that crossed his face wasn’t fear. It was the look of a man who’d walked into a room expecting it arranged one way and found it arranged another.
“What is this? Who are you? Why are you in my girlfriend’s room?”
“He’s visiting,” Lacey said quietly.
Derek’s gaze cut to her. Fast. Reflexive. And underneath it, gone almost before it landed, the quick bright heat of a man unaccustomed to having his assumptions corrected.
“Tyler—” he started, then stopped, having called her by the wrong name. He recalibrated. “Dana—baby—how are you feeling—” Caught himself again. “Lacey. How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” she said.
“I’m going to need you to leave,” Derek told Wade. Reasonable. One man to another. “Private matter.”
“I was invited.”
“By who? By Lacey?”
Derek’s jaw shifted. He was doing the math. Measuring the patch on Wade’s vest. Deciding what to do with what he was looking at.
This was the moment Russ had warned him about. He’s good at making the people around him talk him back in.
“Look,” he said, shifting registers, going for candid. “I don’t know what she told you, but I want you to know the full picture. We’ve had a hard few months. Relationships go through rough patches. That’s not a crime. She fell down the stairs. It was an accident. This is between us.”
“I’m not involved,” Wade said. “I’m sitting in a chair.”
“I’d like you to leave.”
“I know.”
Derek’s face cycled through adjustments and landed on a decision.
“I’m going to get Doctor Carmichael.” He looked at Lacey. “Start getting your things together, sweetheart.”
He walked out.
Lacey’s good hand found the edge of the blanket.
“He’s going to come back with the doctor. Doctor Carmichael already signed off on my discharge. He and Derek play golf together. Derek mentioned it the first day.”
Two minutes later Derek returned with Doctor Carmichael. Silver-haired. Mid-fifties. The bearing of a man used to being the most important person in most rooms.
“Mr. Bristow, I’ve spoken with Mr. Holt. He’s asked that you leave. I’m asking you to do the same.”
“I’m not leaving,” Wade said.
“This is a medical facility. You have no basis for being in this patient’s room.”
“Lacey asked me to stay. She hasn’t asked me to leave.”
“Mr. Holt is her partner and her emergency contact. He has the right to—”
“He stays,” Lacey said. Clear. Without raising her voice.
The room went quiet. Doctor Carmichael caught himself.
“Lacey, you need to rest. Mr. Holt is here to take you home, where you can recover properly. This gentleman has no—”
“I want him to stay,” Lacey said again. Without heat. Without pleading. Just a fact.
“I’ll need to consult with my supervisor,” Carmichael said, and left. His shoes loud on the linoleum in a way they hadn’t been on the way in.
Derek stayed in the doorway, watching Lacey’s wrist. Her cheekbone. The way you look at things you put there.
“This is not going to go the way you’re planning,” he told Wade. Quiet. Conversational. “You don’t know what you’ve walked into.”
Wade said nothing.
Derek tried a different register.
“Look. I get it. Someone told you something. You heard one side.” He spread his hands. “I know what the patch means to people. What they assume. But you’re a reasonable man. You can see this is private. Two people going through a hard time.”
He let a beat of something resembling regret cross his face.
“I’ve made mistakes. I know that. But that’s between us. That’s ours to work through.”
He turned to Lacey, voice dropping lower, calibrated for a specific frequency.
“Baby, you know this isn’t what you want. We’ve been together two years. You don’t just walk away from two years. Come home tonight and we’ll talk through everything. Whatever you need.”
Lacey looked at him for a long moment. The face of a woman who’d heard this speech before. At a kitchen table. In a hallway. With her back against the wall. And was, for the first time, hearing it from outside the room it was built for.
“No,” she said. One word. Flat. A door closing.
“No,” she said again when he started to argue. Same word. Same flatness.
Derek straightened. Adjusted his jacket. And put the reasonable-man expression back on like a coat he wasn’t sure still fit.
“I’ll give you time,” he told her. “We’ll talk when you’re thinking clearly.” He looked at Wade. “And you. Whatever you think you’re doing, I hope you know what it costs.”
“I know exactly what it costs,” Wade said.
Derek held his gaze three seconds, then walked toward the nurses’ station, already pulling out his phone.
Through the half-open door, Wade watched Derek talking to a man in a suit. Hospital administration, by the look of him. Phone out. Showing something on the screen.
This was the part Russ had meant. Good at making the people around him talk him back in.
“He’s called his lawyer before,” Lacey said quietly. “Last time I tried to leave, he had someone on the phone in five minutes. He knows people here. Not just Doctor Carmichael. He donated equipment to the pediatric wing two years ago. There’s a plaque.”
Wade filed that away.
“Is there anyone coming?” she asked.
“Eleven.”
She closed her eyes for a second.
“I kept thinking someone would notice. Someone who could actually do something. I didn’t think it would be you.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Wade said.
Three minutes later the man in the suit appeared. Marcus Whitlock. Patient relations. Mid-forties, with the careful neutrality of someone doing a job he hadn’t designed and didn’t entirely endorse.
“Mr. Bristow, your presence has been flagged as a potential policy violation. Mr. Holt has filed a complaint.”
“Has the patient asked me to leave?” Wade said.
Whitlock looked at Lacey. She said no.
“Nevertheless, hospital policy—” Whitlock started.
“Get me the policy in writing,” Wade said. “I’ll read it carefully. Until then I’m a visitor invited to stay by the patient. Is there anything else?”
Whitlock stood in the doorway a moment longer, then left without another word.