Reyes was easy to find—still in scrubs, coming out of an elevator with a chart. When I said Maddie’s name, her face shifted. It was the look of someone deciding how much of the truth to tell a stranger.
"She seemed off today," Reyes said. "I asked if she was okay as she was leaving. She told me she just needed a drive to clear her head."
I thanked her and walked back to my car.
A drive. To clear her head.
I sat behind the wheel and thought about Maddie the way I thought about problems I needed to solve: systematically, working outward from what I knew. She wasn't at home. She wasn't at the hospital. She was driving, alone, at night.
She'd been avoiding my calls all day. Since Thursday, since before Thursday. Since?—
I thought about Tuesday.
About the yard behind the garage, my phone call, and the way her face had done something quick and careful when she'd seen the bruise.
I thought about what she knew. What she'd seen. What it would have looked like from the outside.
Oh no.
I started the car.
I drove without being entirely sure where I was going, just moving, following some instinct that was pulling me somewhere specific. Past the hospital, leaving Cedar Falls behind, the streets getting narrower and more familiar. I drove past Calloway Street, then kept going.
I turned into the corner where we used to live and there she was.
Her car, parked outside the old building. The building with the gap in the window frame and the radiator that had never worked and the kitchen floor where everything had happened. She was just sitting there, engine off, swallowed by the dark
I pulled up behind her.
I sat for a moment, looking at the back of her head through the windscreen. The set of her shoulders, the way she was very still.
I turned off the ignition, took a breath, and stepped out into the cold air.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Madison
Igot out of the car.
The night was cold—that sharp, undecided cold of an April evening. I wrapped my coat tighter and stood on the pavement. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and behind us, the building was just a building: brick, glass, and a front door that no longer belonged to us.
Except it did. It always had.
"You've been avoiding me," he said. It didn't sound like an accusation.
"I've been busy."
He looked at me. He knew my "busy" better than anyone.
"I've been—" I stopped. Started again. "I saw you. Thursday. At The Anchor." I made myself say it plainly, the way I said hard things to patients: direct and with no softening. "You were with a woman. And you'd told me that morning you were working."
He went very still.
"And there have been the calls," I continued. "The ones you take in the other room. And your face… that wasn't a corner of a bay, Jack. I'm a surgeon. I know what a punch looks like." My voice was steady. I was proud of how steady it was. "And I know it's probably nothing. I know I'm—I know what this lookslike. Me, standing on this street, saying these things." I gestured vaguely at the building behind me. "I know how this sounds."
"Maddie—"
"I'm scared," I said.