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.
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 behindthat 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, asecurity 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.