Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Jack
Ihadn't been back in twelve years. The airport was smaller than I remembered, or I'd just spent too long in places where the airport was a gravel strip and a windsock. Cedar Falls Regional. Two gates. A woman behind a desk who looked up when I came through and looked back down.
I picked up the rental. A Chevy Malibu, grey, smelled like the last person's air freshener. I put the address into the phone and followed it out of the lot and didn't think about where I was going until I was already on streets I recognised.
Branford Street first. The medical examiner's office was a low brick building set back from the road, the kind of building that didn't advertise what it was. A sign by the door, small, professional. A receptionist took my name and asked me to wait.
You do the hard thing before you can talk yourself out of it.
The man who came in said her name before he showed me anything. I don't know if that was protocol or just something he'd learned to do. Either way I was grateful.
She looked smaller than I remembered. Cassie had always taken up more space than her size accounted for—the laugh, the way she came into a room—and whatever was lying there behind that glass had none of it. Just the shape of her. Just my sister's face gone somewhere I couldn't follow.
Her hands had been folded. Like she was resting. Like someone had arranged her that way, which I suppose someone had.
I thought about a night when I was twenty-four.
I'd done something I couldn't take back and I'd shown up at her door at midnight with nowhere else to go.
She made coffee and sat across the table and at some point she reached over and put her hands over mine without saying anything.
Just closed the distance. Her hands were warm.
I hadn't known until that moment how cold I was.
Now her hands were folded and still and I was standing on the wrong side of the glass.
I stood there a moment longer. Then I told the man what he needed to hear, signed where he pointed, and let him lead me back out through the corridor. My legs were working. The rest of me wasn't quite.
Outside the cold hit me. I stood next to the car with my palm flat on the roof and didn't move for a while.
Then I got in and drove.
* * *
Cedar Falls Memorial sat just over the city line in Millhaven. Biggest hospital within sixty miles. If something went wrong in Cedar Falls—a car accident, anything serious—this was where they brought you.
I pulled into the lot and sat for a moment with the engine running.
The building was large and new-looking, the kind of place that had been expanded in stages, each addition slightly different from the last. Automatic doors, a covered drop-off, a security guard just inside who glanced up when I came through.
I went to the desk and gave Cassie's name and the woman typed something and told me third floor, family liaison.
The elevator was slow. I watched the numbers change.
The third floor was quieter than the lobby. A nurse at the station halfway down pointed me toward Family Services without getting up. I walked past a row of closed doors. Through one of them someone was crying, low and steady. I kept walking.
The woman outside the door marked Family Services was late forties, dark blazer, a file folder held against her chest. She had the look of someone who spent their days in rooms like this—not hardened exactly, just settled.
She looked at me and I looked at her and neither of us said anything for a second.
I thought about the rig. The platform, the wind, the flat nothing of the North Dakota horizon.
Six months out there and nobody had needed anything from me that I couldn't deliver with my hands.
The problems were physical. You could see them.
You either fixed them or you didn't and either way you knew where you stood.
This was going to be different.
"Mr. Henley."
"Yeah." I looked past her down the corridor. "Lily—is she here?"
"She's safe and being looked after." A pause, measured. "If you'll come in, there are some things we need to go through first."
I looked at her for a moment. Then I followed her in.
The room was small and neutral, the kind of room designed not to feel like anything. Two chairs across a table, a box of tissues nobody wanted to acknowledge. She sat and set the file down and I saw my name on the tab before she'd opened it. She'd been preparing for me.
She folded her hands and looked at me with the careful expression of someone about to ask questions they already knew the answers to.
I sat down. I had a feeling this was going to take a while.