“Then why the consult?”
“Because you nearly drowned in trauma and didn’t realize you’d surfaced.” She tilted her head. “Now your body’s safe. That doesn’t mean your brain agrees.”
Dante exhaled. “What if I don’t want to talk about the room?”
“Then we don’t talk about it,” she said. “We talk around it. We talk about anything else.”
“And if it slips out?”
“Then we go with it.”
He looked at her, hard. Testing.
She didn’t blink.
Dante finally leaned back, eyelids heavy. “I still hear it,” he admitted. “The scrape of the bucket, the slurp of the water. It’s like… pressure in my teeth.”
“That’s memory,” she said. “It leaks.”
He nodded. “You ever been tortured?”
She didn’t answer that. Instead, she said, “You weren’t broken. You’re here. That means there’s a you left to work with. We build from that.”
He stared at the ceiling. “I wasn’t supposed to make it.”
She wrote nothing, but her voice softened. “You did.”
O‘REILLY’S OFFICE
While Dante was with the psychiatrist, Shannon sat in a chair that felt far too comfortable to be in a medical director’s office.
Jamison O’Reilly closed the patient file and leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “Vitals are stabilizing. The catheter site looks clean. Labs this morning were the best yet.”
Shannon didn’t smile. “Don’t do the silver lining thing. I’m here for the real.”
He exhaled. “The real is that if we can keep the line clear, avoid infection, and maintain nutrition, we might get him on a transplant list by month’s end.”
“And psych?”
“Eliza says he’s not resisting. He’s observing her. Processing. He’s functional but… scared and scarred.”
“Not surprising,” Shannon murmured.
Jamie hesitated. “When’s the last time you slept more than four hours?”
She gave him a withering look.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Caregivers crash harder than patients. Don’t pretend you’re immune.”
She didn’t answer that.
Jamie opened a drawer and pulled out a keycard. “Room 1912—private guest suite. Get some air.”
“I’m not leaving him.”
“Then use it when he’s with his mom, or when he sleeps.”
She took it and didn’t say thank you. But he didn’t need her to.
