"Timing belt done?" he asked.
"Done," I said.
"Good." He put his mug down, then stretched his back. "Get the Civic finished by four."
He went back to work.
I finished my coffee, put the mug on the shelf, and went back to the Civic. My hand ached where the wrench had caught it, but I worked around it.
Three fifteen I was at the school gate.
Lily came out with her backpack and fell into step beside me without saying anything. We walked home the way we always walked home. She pointed at the cat on the wall. I nodded.
Halfway down Clement Street she said, without looking up: "Maddie was home last night. I heard her."
I looked at the pavement ahead. "She was. For a bit."
Lily nodded and we kept walking.
"I like Maddie," she said, out of the blue. Three flat and certain words.
I looked at the street ahead of us, at the ordinary Friday afternoon of it, at the cat on the wall watching us pass.
Me too, I thought.
And that was the damn problem.
Chapter Forty
Madison
I’d been avoiding the fifth floor.
Not consciously. Or at least, that was the lie I told myself. I had cases on two and three, and the OR was on four; there was no clinical reason to take the scenic route through Cardiology. For two weeks, I’d successfully choreographed my day to bypass Tom’s office. Then, on Thursday afternoon, I rounded a corner and ran out of hallway.
There he was, clutching a coffee and a patient file. There was nowhere to go.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
We stood in the corridor as the afternoon light slanted through the window at the end of the ward, cutting through the usual hospital haze. Around us, the hum of rolling gurneys and soft-sole shoes went on, indifferent. He looked well. Rested. He looked like he’d processed a loss and come out the other side with his seams intact.
"You have a minute?" he asked.
We found a couple of chairs in the small waiting area at the end of the corridor, the one nobody used much except for the occasional family killing time between appointments. Tom sethis file on the low table and cradled his coffee with both hands. He watched me with that directness that had always made it impossible to be anything less than transparent.
"I wasn't sure how things stood," he said. "Between us. I thought I'd just… ask. Rather than let it sit there." He paused, searching my expression. "Would you want to have dinner sometime? Soon?"
I studied him.
I felt the gravitational pull of it. The uncomplicated grace of the offer. Tom was a known quantity; dinner with him was a warm room with no history to excavate. I could say yes and slide back into something comfortable. I could call it a life and be genuinely fine. A part of me wanted that so badly I could feel it.
I lowered my gaze to my hands.
The problem was I'd sat at a kitchen table at four in the morning and said things I hadn't planned to say and meant all of them. The problem was a man who I should've forgotten but hadn't, and a child who treated liking me as a basic law of the universe. I was being offered an off-ramp, but I’d already looked away. I could feel the decision I'd already made sitting somewhere underneath all the uncertainty, quiet and inconvenient and entirely mine.
"Tom," I said.