Chapter 35
thirty-five
Remy
The sutures hold. Seven interrupted stitches above her right ear, each one placed with the same spacing I'd use on any patient in any field hospital on any continent, and my hands didn't shake for a single one.
They're steady now as I check the cardiac monitor, reading the green line that tracks across the screen in even peaks.
Heart rate sixty-two. Oxygen ninety-seven percent.
Blood pressure normalizing, one-ten over seventy, better than the ninety-two over fifty-eight I got on the helicopter when her skin was the color of cold candle wax.
I adjust the IV drip, counting the seconds between drops, same count I've done ten thousand times.
Saline and a low-dose analgesic, nothing that will mask neurological changes.
The concussion protocol runs on a two-hour cycle, and I've already completed the first check.
Pupils equal now, both reactive, the asymmetry correcting itself, which means the brain isn't bleeding.
Three hours ago my hands shook so badly I barely keyed the comm.
I stand at the foot of her bed and read the chart I wrote myself, because reading it again gives my eyes somewhere to go that isn't her face. Core temperature back to ninety-seven-point-eight and climbing. Color where there wasn't color. The numbers do what numbers do when a body decides to stay.
The blanket I layered over her is hospital-grade thermal, ugly and gray, and her dark hair spills across the white pillow above it like something that belongs in a different room entirely.
I move to the chair beside her bed and sit. My chest still keeps the impression of her weight from the elevator ride down, low and hollow against my sternum, a bruise that hasn't finished forming.
Fourteen nights I stood in her doorway and didn't say a word. Watched her breathe. Counted her exhales like data points. Told myself the silence was discipline.
"Your sutures look good." My voice is low enough that it won't register on the monitor's audio log, just above the beeping.
"Clean margins. Minimal tension. You won't even feel them once the local wears off, which.
" I stop. Swallow. "Which is going to hurt, so I left instructions for acetaminophen at the nursing station.
Not the good stuff, because I need you lucid for neuro checks, and you're gonna be annoyed about that when you wake up. "
She doesn't stir. Her breathing stays even, deep and slow, the rhythm of genuine exhaustion rather than the careful performance I memorized on all those nights in her bedroom.
"I found you on a dirt road." The words come out before I decide to say them, rough at the edges, and the drawl is there and I don't correct it.
"Barefoot. Bleeding. I almost—" My throat closes around the rest of that sentence.
"You ran, Evangeline. You heard an engine and you ran, and your ankle was already broken and you ran anyway, and I need you to know that I—"
Fourteen nights of silence. And now she's in a hospital bed because someone took her and I wasn't there, and I can't shut up.
"I should have been there." It comes out like a fact, not an apology, because it is one.
"You told me to stay with my family. I stayed.
I was in New Orleans pullin' my brother out of a hotel room, and you were in a chair answering questions about wire transfers you processed because your father told you to, and I should have been there. "
The monitor beeps. Steady. Sixty-one beats per minute.
I lean back in the chair, hands heavy on my thighs.
She asked for me. Darcy said she asked for me.
My hands are still. The monitor beeps. Evie sleeps. I sit in the antiseptic quiet of the room and listen to her breathe.
I've done this before. Except this time I'm talking, this time she can't hear me, this time the distance between the chair and the bed is three feet, not the inch between my mouth and her ear when I taught her body to stay. None of that math changes what I am.
"Evangeline." Even, clinical. Any patient on a neuro check would hear the same tone. "I need you to open your eyes for me."
She surfaces slowly. Her lids flutter, and for a second her pupils are uneven in the overhead light before they equalize, both contracting against the fluorescent glare.
I click the penlight on and hold it six inches from her face, tracking left to right, watching the smooth pursuit of her gaze follow the beam without lag or drift.
"Can you tell me where you are?"
"Hospital." Her voice is rough, stripped thin, but the word comes without hesitation. Her eyes drift past my shoulder, searching for a window that isn't there. "Are we still in the fields?"
"You're in San Francisco. We flew you in." Neutral, clinical. The helicopter ride is a conversation for when she doesn't have a concussion. "What day is it?"
She has to think about that one. Her brow creases, and I count the seconds because the protocol says I have to. "Wednesday."
"Friday." I hold up three fingers. "How many?"
She doesn't react to the missing days. The cost of them moves through her face without finding anywhere to land. "Three." Her eyes shift from my hand to my face, and whatever she finds there makes her go quiet in a way that has nothing to do with the concussion. "You look terrible."
"You're the one in the bed, dove."
"Have you slept?" She says it simply, the way she says things that are true and inarguable, and I don't have a clinical response to that so I check the IV drip. Twelve seconds between drops. Her fluid balance is stabilizing, kidneys working, the saline doing what saline does.
My fingers find her wrist because the monitor is reading sixty-three but I want to feel it, and the moment my thumb settles over the radial artery I know this was a mistake.
Her skin is warm now. Not the waxy cold from the road when her body was dumping heat faster than it could make it, but warm, alive, and my thumb is sitting on the same vein I've traced in the dark of my bedroom while she slept, while I mapped the rhythm of her heart because I wanted to know it without a chart.
Sixty-four. Strong. Regular. She's fine. Let go.
I don't let go.
"There were two of them," she says.
I set her wrist down carefully on the blanket. "You don't have to do this tonight."
"Legal pad and a phone. The one with the legal pad asked real questions, disbursement schedules, donor meeting logistics.
The other one didn't care." She pauses, and I watch her eyes fix on a point past the far wall.
"They weren't good at it, Remy. They were sloppy.
Left me alone with an unlocked phone. And a window I'd already cased. "
The Blanchard voice. She measured what she gave them and gave them less. The performance she's been trying to shed all summer is the thing that got her out.
She got herself out. I wasn't there, but she got herself out.
"Stole his phone while I asked for the bathroom." The corner of her mouth twitches, and it's not a smile but it's close. "He left it on the table. Screen still unlocked."
"That's how you called Darcy."
"Couldn't remember your number." Her eyes close, and for a second I think I've lost her to sleep, but then she opens them again and looks at me with a clarity that a concussion shouldn't allow.
"I remembered Darcy's. From when we were fourteen and she made me memorize it in case I ever needed to call someone who wasn't my father. "
I adjust the thermal blanket over her shoulders because my hands need a task, and the task needs to be something that isn't touching her face or pressing my mouth against her forehead or saying any of the things that are stacking up behind my teeth like a confession I haven't earned the right to give.
"You did good, Evangeline."
She doesn't flinch. For the first time since I've known her, the praise lands and she doesn't flinch.
Then, soft: "Stay with your family."
She returns the words the way you return something that broke. Three days ago she gave them to me on a phone call, and now they sit in the room with everything that happened after.
"Don't carry that one." My hand finds her wrist again, settles there. "Not that one."
Her thumb brushes my pulse. Once. Then nothing.
I lift the thermal blanket off her right foot and check the wrap.
The elastic compression sits where I placed it, even tension across the outside of her ankle, no migration, no swelling past the borders.
I nudge the foam elevation wedge a hair higher because the angle is shy of where I want it, and my hands are grateful for the geometry of it, the clean math of ankle stabilization that doesn't require me to think about anything except tissue and gravity.
I set the blanket back over her foot.
My expression changes. I know because Evie's eyes move across it, reading what's there before the person wearing it can rearrange the furniture. The same scan she runs on a room full of donors.
She doesn't push.
"How's Landry?"
The door she's holding open is so pointed that I almost smile.
"Bruised ribs, split lip, bruised jaw. Nothing structural.
" I pull the chair closer to the bed and sit, elbows on my knees.
"Found him in a hotel room in New Orleans with the deadbolt on and the curtains drawn.
Two men pulled him out of a parking garage after a board meeting and asked questions about financial entities. "
"Which ones?"
"American Civic Trust."
Recognition lands in her face before she has words for it. "I signed that. I never asked what it was."
"And LeBlanc Holdings."
Her recognition arrives a second time, slower. Her father's signatures, her own signatures, and now LeBlanc Holdings: Garden District, a hundred-year-old name, the family her body has been writing into the margins of every kitchen scene since June.
She doesn't say I'm sorry. She says, "They're not done."
"No." I take her hand. "They're not."