“One more,” he said for the third time.
“Russo, I have beaten you six times in a row. At some point this stops being a rematch and starts being a support group.”
“One more.”
My phone buzzed on the table beside me. I glanced at it out of habit, ready to ignore it, and then I read the message and didn’t.
Ellie:Grandpa’s in the hospital. It’s bad We’re in the ED.
Three lines. No period at the end of the second sentence. I read it twice, not because I didn’t understand it the first time, but because the missing punctuation caught me somewhere around the ribs, and I needed a second to place it. Ellie Granger had been correcting my grammar since the second grade. She was the kind of person who proofread text messages. A missingperiod wasn’t an accident. A missing period was a fault line, small and telling, the kind of detail that said she’d typed it fast and hadn’t looked back, and Ellie always looked back. That one absent dot told me everything about how she was doing that the words themselves hadn’t managed to.
“Hey.” Twitch looked up from his side of the table. He was twenty-four and ran on what I was fairly certain was a proprietary blend of caffeine and ambient chaos, but he wasn’t oblivious. “You good?”
“I gotta go.” I was already grabbing my keys.
Cord Gaffney looked up from the couch where he’d been pretending to read a magazine while actually texting his fiancée, Lucy, which was his primary hobby these days. “Everything okay, Meatball?”
“Ellie’s grandfather. Hospital.” I was moving toward the door. “Don’t let Russo retire the table on my behalf. I’ll be back to defend my title.”
“Go,” Cord said. “We’ve got it.”
I was in my truck before the door swung shut behind me.
Huckleberry Creek General was eight minutes from the station on a normal day. I made it in five and a half, which I was not going to mention to anyone who worked in traffic enforcement. I left the truck crooked across a space in the ED lot and shot through the sliding doors at a pace that was technically not running but wasn’t not running either.
The emergency department waiting area smelled like industrial cleaner and recycled air. A television mounted in the corner was running a cable news segment with the sound off, and under it, in a plastic chair against the far wall, was Ellie.
She had her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. Still in the Granger Hardware polo she wore most days, her hair coming loose from its knot. She hadn’t heard me come in.
I crossed the room and crouched down in front of her. “Hey.”
She lifted her head. Her eyes were red at the rims but dry, the particular look of someone who has been holding it together through sheer force of will and is running low on reserves. When she registered that it was me, something in her face shifted—not relief, exactly. More like a held breath finally let go.
“You didn’t have to come.”
It was such an Ellie thing to say that I almost smiled.
“I was in the middle of humiliating Twitch at foosball.” I sat down in the chair next to hers. “Tell me what happened.”
She pressed her lips together. “I stopped by after closing up, like I always do. He wasn’t at the door when I pulled up, which—he always hears my car. I found him on the kitchen floor.” Her voice stayed steady, but only just. “I don’t know how long he’d been there.”
“But he was conscious?”
“In and out. He knew who I was.” She exhaled. “They took him for a CT scan when we got here, and I haven’t heard anything since. That was forty minutes ago.”
Forty minutes she’d been sitting here alone in this plastic chair with bad lighting and a muted news cycle, running worst-case scenarios. The thought sat unpleasantly in my chest.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m here now. We wait together.”
She looked at me for a moment, something working behind her eyes that she didn’t say out loud. Then she nodded and sat back, and I shifted my chair close enough that our shoulders were touching, and we waited.
It was another twenty minutes before Dr. Ray Whitfield came through the double doors. I knew Ray the way you know anyone in a town this size. Not intimately, but with the familiarity of shared geography. He’d stitched up my hand once after a call had gone badly, and he’d been Gus’s doctor for as long as I could remember. Broad through the shoulders, white-haired, the kindof man who occupied space without trying. He’d always struck me as someone who said what he meant and meant what he said.
He looked at Ellie first. Something moved across his face, there and gone, too quick to name.
“Ellie,” he said. “Let’s find somewhere to sit.”
“Just tell me, Ray.”
