Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Madison
Tom caught me in the corridor outside the break room, which meant he'd been looking for me. He had his coat on, a coffee in each hand, and he was looking at me with that patient expression I’d stopped deserving somewhere around the second week of March.
"Hate to keep asking," he said, "but the wine tasting. They need numbers by Friday."
I looked at the coffees, then at him. He wasn't even annoyed. He was just waiting for me to come back from wherever I’d gone.
"Tom—"
"It's fine if it's a no," he said, cutting me off with a small, practiced smile. "I just need to know. The gallery needs the list."
It wasn't a no. It wasn't a yes, either. It was the same thing it had been every time he’d asked: a vague intention to get there, to be present, to finally stop being somewhere else. I’d been meaning to "get there" for weeks.
"Can I let you know tomorrow?" I said.
I hated the sound of my own voice. That damned hesitation, that stall. It was the sound of someone who had everything and was still looking for a way out.
He looked at me for a moment. Then he handed me one of the coffees, nodded, and walked on. I stood in the corridor and watched him go, feeling the discomfort of being let off a hook you didn’t deserve to be let off. His patience felt like a debt I had no way of paying back.
I had a pre-op consult at eleven. The patient was seven, a boy named Marco, in for a routine appendectomy that his parents had clearly been losing sleep over for weeks.
They were both there, mother on one side of the bed, father on the other.
Marco sat between them, looking slightly bored in the way of children who don't yet understand what is worth being scared of. I went through the mechanics of it: the procedure, the anesthetic, the recovery. The mother asked questions she’d curated in a small spiral notebook, and the father held Marco’s hand and didn't say much.
At one point, Marco told me his favorite color was green, unprompted, and I acknowledged the fact with the gravity it deserved.
It was fine. It was better than fine—a straightforward case, a healthy kid, parents who’d done their homework. I shook their hands and left, the click of the door sealing them back into their safe, worried little world.
I stood in the corridor for a moment after the door closed. I didn't know why I was still standing there. Then I did.
Lily had lost her father before she was old enough to remember him, and now she’d lost her mother.
Whatever version of that room existed for her going forward—the hand-holding, the notebooks, the two-sided protection—it was gone.
It was always going to look different. It was always going to be a room with a hole in it.
I stood there a moment longer than I needed to. Then I moved on.
The day filled in around me the way days did.
A post-op check at two, a consult that ran long, the corridor between one thing and the next.
Somewhere in the middle of it I found myself standing at the window at the end of the ward, looking out at the rows of cars in the lot and thinking about texting Jack.
Not for any reason. Just… checking in. Seeing how the first week had gone. It was a reasonable thing to do. We weren't strangers. Cassie had been my friend.
The logic felt thin, even to me. I put my phone back in my pocket.
Instead, I took the stairs to the third floor. I found Karen Phelps coming out of her office with a thick file tucked under her arm.
"Dr. Clarke." She didn't look surprised to see me, which I found mildly unsettling. It was as if she’d been expecting me to show up eventually.
"The Henley placement," I said. "I just wanted to check in. See how things were settling."
Karen considered me for a moment, her eyes unreadable, then tilted her head toward her office. I followed her in.
She sat, set the file down with a deliberate thud, and folded her hands.
"The home walkthrough went fine. The house is clean, safe, and well-organized for a child. Lily has her own room, her own things." She paused, her gaze dropping to the folder. "He hasn’t touched anything of Cassie’s yet. It’s a shrine in there, but that's understandable.
We're not looking for perfection this early. "
"And Lily?"
"Back at school as of Monday. Teacher reports she's quiet but engaged. Eating. Sleeping." She paused, her voice softening just a fraction. "These things take time, Maddie. There's no fast-forward button for a five-year-old."
"And him?" I asked.
Phelps looked at me over the top of her glasses. "He got a job. A garage over on Millhaven Road." A beat. "He moved fast on that. Most people in his position would still be staring at the walls. He was clocking in before the dirt was dry."
A garage. Of course it was a garage. I looked toward the window, the image of him in coveralls flashing through my mind like a slide on a projector.
"Monthly review is in three weeks," Phelps said. "On paper, everything is on track." She paused, and her tone shifted. "Dr. Clarke."
I looked back at her.
"How invested are you in this?" she asked. It wasn't a reprimand. It was just direct. "You knew the mother, I understand that. But you’ve checked in twice now, and you're a busy woman."
"Cassie was my friend," I said. My voice sounded steady, but the words felt like they were covering up something much larger and less convenient.
"Mm." She looked back down at the file, her pen hovering over a page. "And the brother?"
I held her gaze, refusing to blink. "We knew each other. A long time ago."
Phelps nodded slowly, the way she nodded when she was filing something away rather than responding to it. "The placement is going well," she said. "He’s doing the right things, in the right order. Lily is safe." She looked at me over the rims of her glasses. "You don’t need to worry, Maddie."
"I know," I said. But knowing wasn't the problem.
She picked up the file and moved it to the end of her desk. I took that as the end of the conversation and stood up.
"For what it's worth," Phelps said, not looking up from her desk, "she’s lucky to have people keeping an eye out. Both of them."
I didn't say anything to that.
I took the stairs back down and stood in the parking lot for a minute, the cold March air biting through my scrubs.
A garage on Millhaven Road. His hands on an engine, the radio on low, the world reduced to what he could reach with a wrench.
I knew that version of him like I knew the layout of a house I hadn’t lived in for twelve years—the exact height of the workbench, the way he looked when he was thinking, the smell of grease and old denim.
I went back to work. But the ward felt smaller than it had ten minutes ago.