35. We Have Eyes -Libby #2
I moved back through the hallway, grabbing a chair from the reception area as I went.
Methodically, I worked through every room, climbing to check each window latch, testing it, climbing down, and moving to the next.
The windows were small and set high, mirroring the one I’d used to enter—not easy access, but not impossible if something outside became determined.
Each time I stepped up, my eyes scanned the dark outside for movement, for shapes. The land behind the building remained empty. The treeline held steady. The darkness stayed dark.
When the last window was secured, I stood in the hallway and listened: Fiona’s low murmur from the exam room as she talked Lily through something. Nothing out of place.
Then I started thinking beyond the next ten minutes. We weren’t leaving tonight, which meant we needed somewhere to sleep.
I found the storage room and paused in the doorway, taking inventory. Packaged dog beds, still sealed, stacked in a column against the back wall. Clean. Unused. Better than the floor in every measurable way, and not worth being picky about.
“Good enough,” I said to the cat, who had followed me and now sat in the hallway, observing my decision-making with polite neutrality.
I dragged the beds into the two windowless exam rooms, spacing them to accommodate three people without being cramped. The linen closet, surprisingly well-stocked, held sheets still in their packaging and a stack of folded blankets on the upper shelf—items someone had ordered and never used.
By the time I brought everything back to Finn’s room, Fiona straightened, rolling her shoulders.
“Closure is holding,” she said, her words clipped with exhaustion. “Last stitch is in. Now for the antibiotics.”
I looked at her hands, still steady even now. I didn’t know what that cost her.
“How is he?”
She set the instrument down and briefly pressed the back of her wrist against her forehead, the closest she’d come to showing exhaustion since we’d carried him in.
“Bleeding’s stopped,” she said. “That’s the most important thing right this second.
” She looked at his face, then back at me.
“He lost a lot of blood before I got it under control. He’ll be out for a while, and it’s going to hurt like hell when he wakes.
But the wound is clean and closed, and the antibiotics give us a fighting chance against infection. ”
The relief that moved through me didn’t arrive neatly. It came in uneven, almost painful pieces, each part landing before I was ready for the next.
“I’ve got beds set up,” I said. “Both rooms off the hall.”
Lily looked up from where she’d lowered herself onto the edge of a stool, her arm finally dropping from the angle she’d held it at for what felt like forever.
“Beds?”
“Dog beds,” I said. “Temper your enthusiasm.”
Exhaustion ghosted across her face in a smile. “I’d sleep on concrete right now. The actual floor.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “Come on.”
Moving Finn again was a quiet, careful operation. He didn’t wake, didn’t register it at all, his weight distributed between us as we lowered him onto the bed I’d set up. We adjusted his position until Fiona was satisfied his shoulder sat at the right angle.
I pulled a blanket over him and stood there for a moment, looking at his face.
He looked strange like this. The scar above his eyebrow seemed starker against his pale skin, the dark stubble dusting a jaw that had lost all its usual tension. It was the absolute stillness that was wrong, an absence of animation that made him look like a stranger. Smaller, somehow.
“He’s going to be okay,” Fiona said from beside me, reading whatever had appeared on my face.
I looked at her. “Yeah?”
“I did everything that could be done with what we have,” she said, her voice measured but honest. “Now we need him to wake up. Which he will.”
Fiona looked at me, then at the bed I’d set up a careful distance from Finn’s. A small smile touched her lips. “Libby,” she said, “you can move that.”
I didn’t respond.
“We have eyes,” Lily offered helpfully from across the room, adding in a much quieter voice, “and ears.”
I blushed hard but remained silent.
I moved the bed.
The room settled into an exhaustion-laden silence.
Lily sat on her bed and let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere cellular. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my entire life,” she said, and the simple exhaustion in her voice felt like the most honest thing anyone had said all day.
“Same,” I said.
Fiona settled onto the floor beside Finn’s bed, her back against the wall, close enough that her hand rested near his arm without quite touching it—near enough to feel any change, near enough to be there, not quite close enough to disturb him.
The cat appeared from the hallway and assessed the room with the practiced authority of something conducting a formal inspection, then chose Lily’s lap with the decisive confidence of a creature that had made its decision.
“We should take shifts,” Lily said, reaching down to stroke the cat’s back. “Like we did at home.”
“I’ll take first,” I said, less an offer than a statement of fact.
Fiona shook her head, her expression leaving no room for argument. “No. You’ve done enough. You need to rest.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Libby.” Her gaze was direct, cutting through any protest I might have made. “Your hands haven’t stopped shaking since you came back inside.”
I looked down at them. She wasn’t wrong.
“Okay,” I said, and the word came out with more surrender than I’d intended.
“Get some rest,” she said. “I’ll wake you in two hours, and if anything changes before then, I promise I’ll wake you.”
I looked at Finn one more time: at the steadiness of his breathing, at the blanket I’d pulled over him, at Fiona’s hand resting near his arm.
Then I moved to the space next to him, lowered myself onto the bed, and pulled a blanket around me.