Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Madison
Tom was saying something about a conference in Seattle when I realized I hadn't heard the last three sentences.
"Sorry," I said. "Say that again."
He did, patient as always, and I listened this time and said the right thing and picked up my wine. The restaurant was warm. Someone had made an effort with the lighting. I was aware of all of it from a slight distance, like watching a room through glass.
"You're not here," Tom said. "You’re… vibrating.” He held up one hand, fingers trembling in a quick little motion.
"I'm here," I lied.
He looked at me.
"Rough day," I finally said.
"The MVA?"
"Partly."
He nodded and didn't push, which was Tom, and which I was grateful for and somehow also the thing that made me feel most alone at that particular moment. He reached for the bread and asked me something about the Marsh kid from this morning. I answered and the evening moved on. For Tom, anyway.
Cassie Henley. Thirty-eight years old.
I'd been standing at the nurse's station when I saw it.
Just a name on a screen, same as a hundred names on a hundred screens, except it wasn't. I'd stood there long enough that the charge nurse had glanced over, and then I'd walked to the break room and stood at the counter with my hands flat on the surface until they steadied.
We'd lost touch. That was the phrase I kept landing on, like losing touch was something that happened to you rather than something you let happen. The last time I'd seen her she was outside a coffee shop, already half-turned to go. Call me, she'd said. Let's do this again properly.
But I hadn't called, had I?
Cassie’s daughter would be five now. She had sent a photo when the kid was born—dark eyes, serious little face—and I'd been in Baltimore then, residency eating me alive.
I'd looked at it between shifts and thought I'd visit when things slowed down.
Except things didn't slow down. Even when I came back to Colorado and took the job here, calling Cassie became the thing on the list that stayed on the list. The kind of thing you swore you'd get to. The kind of thing you didn't.
I'd never met Cassie’s daughter.
Cassie’s husband had died before the kid could even walk—a brain aneurysm—and Cassie had just kept going, the way she always did, convinced that putting one step in front of the other would eventually get you somewhere.
But now her daughter was alone, and I didn't even know who was coming for her tonight.
"Madison." Tom's voice, quiet. "We don't have to do this tonight."
I looked up. He was watching me with that careful, kind expression, and I thought about how much I liked him and how far away he felt and how none of that was his fault.
"Rain check?" he said.
"Yes." The relief in my voice was real enough that it almost embarrassed me. "I'm sorry. I'm not good company tonight."
"You don't have to be." He signalled for the bill. "Go home. Sleep."
* * *
The cab dropped me at the hospital entrance. I hadn't planned on coming. I'd given the driver the address before I'd made the decision, which was usually how I knew I'd already decided.
Deb was on duty in the pediatric ward—family liaison, fifties, with the stillness of someone who had learned long ago that there was no preparing people for the worst, only sitting with them through it. She looked up when I came through the door.
"Dr. Clarke."
"The little girl from the MVA this afternoon," I said. "I knew her mother."
She held my gaze for a moment. Then she stood. "She's sleeping. One of our volunteers stayed until she went down." A pause. "She knows her mom is hurt. The forever part hasn't landed yet." Another pause, quieter. "She kept asking when she was coming back."
I didn't say anything.
"Do you want to see her?"
She took me down the hall to a door left half open.
She didn't go in and neither did I. Just stood in the doorway with the low nightlight doing its quiet work inside.
A small shape under the blanket. Dark hair against the pillow—that particular dark, the Henley dark, curling at the ends the way it did.
I recognised it and wished I didn't. One arm thrown out to the side the way small children slept, like they had nowhere to be and nothing to protect.
"Next of kin?" I said.
"Notified. On his way in from out of state." Deb's voice was low. "He'll be here tomorrow."
He. I turned that over for a moment. Cassie's husband had family somewhere—a brother, maybe, someone who'd stayed in the picture after he died. It was possible.
Except I knew. Some part of me already knew.
I said goodnight to Deb, walked back to the corridor, and stood at the window at the end of the hall. Outside the rain was falling soft and steady over the parking lot, the streetlights making it silver.
Cassie had no parents—her mother gone since she was a teenager, her father eight years ago, not long after I left for Baltimore.
An aneurysm had taken her husband, and I couldn't think of anyone from his family she'd ever mentioned.
It was possible there was someone. Cassie's life had grown in directions I hadn't followed.
And yet… I knew anyway.
Jack was coming home.
The Jack who'd disappeared. Who'd fallen off the face of the world and turned into smoke. Twelve years and not a word. Not to me, anyway. Cassie had known where he was, probably. I'd never asked.
I pressed my fingers to the cold glass of the window.
This was nothing to do with me. This was the past. A different life, a different version of everything, a Thursday in March I'd spent years learning to leave where it was.
But Jack was coming.
Somewhere, a man I used to know was on a plane, heading straight to heartbreak. And here I was—standing in a hospital corridor at nine o'clock at night, rain in my hair, Cassie's kid asleep down the hall—pretending this had nothing to do with me.
I looked out at the rain for a long time.
Then, finally, I went home.