Dylan twisted his mouth into a shrug. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.
“I’d… um… dropped something,” he said. When Alice squinted at him dubiously, he pointed at his face. “When the groom-of-the-year dropped me.”
“It couldn’t wait till morning?” Alice asked.
“Yeah,” Dylan said. “In hindsight, it probably could have.”
She shook her head and gave an exasperated sigh. “Next time, at least let me know,” she said. “If you’d been in that car when he hit it…”
Alice trailed off. Instead of finishing the sentence, she sucked air noisily through her teeth. Dylan paused as he remembered the remains of his car as he’d last seen it. Creased and flattened, it had looked more like something made of cardboard than metal.
He put his hand on Alice’s shoulder. “So what you’re saying is, I should let you know every time a guy falls for me?”
“Very funny,” Alice huffed. She brushed his hand off her shoulder and sat down to stamp her feet into her work boots. “You know I’ve got to work with Bennett while you’re off? He eats tuna sandwiches, Dylan. Nothing but tuna. I’m going to have to tell my kid that the elf on a shelf is dating a mermaid. So, you know, next time you lose your pen, call and ask them to post it back.”
She shoved her civvies in the locker, slammed the door shut, and headed out. Dylan waited until she was gone and then rubbed his hand over his face.
What else could it be?The question echoed in his head.
There was nothing. The plane, TV drama as it sounded, was the only thing that made sense. But who went on a midnight flight in the dead of winter in leather jeans and bare feet?
And why did they have his grandad’s watch on them?
Except it wasn’t.
Dylan loitered at the nurse’s station while Maud clicked through her records. He fiddled with the watch as he stood there, worn leather tangled around his fingers as the metal case clicked off the counter.
It was his grandad’s watch.
Dylan knew every nick on the band and chip on the face of it. He knew the way it felt in his hand. Even the slight lag on the second hand when it hit twenty-five seconds past.
The only problem was that it wasn’t. Not exactly. The familiar, dark crease in the band, where it had spent years buckled around his grandad’s bony wrist, had been joined by a second, lighter dent in the leather a few slots down. There were stains he didn’t recognize, some fresh from the night before but others old enough to have faded as they were worked into the leather.
Most importantly, it didn’t make the knot of dread in Dylan’s stomach go away. It might look like the same watch, but it wasn’t.
And that didn’t make any more sense than the man who’d dropped out of the sky and landed on Dylan’s car.
“Here we go,” Maud said suddenly.
Dylan closed his hand around the watch and shoved it into his pocket. He leaned over the counter as Maud tick-tacked the keys with her nails. She pursed her lips disapprovingly.
“Night shift put him down as John Snow,” she tutted. “Funny, but not exactly appropriate. He’s in 2D46.”
She tilted her head in that general direction.
“Thanks,” Dylan said and headed that way, fending off the few people he knew on shift with a shrug and a wave.
The door was open when he got there, and Dylan paused. He wasn’t even sure why he was here. Whatever had happened to John Snow, he’d been seriously injured. There was no way he would be up to explaining what the hell had happened to him. Dylan’s questions weren’t going to be answered.
He went in anyhow.
Hospitals were never quiet, but sometimes they were still. Like this. The man in the bed—John Snow—lay on his back under a threadbare white sheet. His body was bulked up under the sheets with bandages, casts, and tubes. He’d been intubated, and his eyes were covered with gauze pads, taped down to bruised skin.
People made noises, even when they were asleep. They scratched or swallowed, fidgeted and farted. Dylan should know. He’d spent most of his life stacked up in bunkbeds with other foster kids or in dorms. He’d not had a room to himself until he was an adult.
The only sounds in John Snow’s room came from the machines around the bed as they monitored his condition and breathed for him.
Dylan had expected that, but he was still obscurely disappointed.
