Nick
Dr. Mehta is a clever woman.
She walks into the room, takes one look at my face, one look at the door Sadie just closed behind her, and in the small silence that follows I can see her do the arithmetic. Her eyes narrow a fraction in assessment. She’s a woman who has spent twenty years reading people across an exam table, and I am letting her read me because I want something from her.
"Mr. Zhirinovsky." She sets her tablet on the counter and washes her hands before lifting the edge of the gauze on my arm and examining the line of neat black stitches. "Your incision is healing remarkably well. Remarkably. Who did your closure?"
"A private doctor. Friend of the family,” I add, but don’t know why.
She re-tapes the gauze with quick clean motions, makes two notes on her tablet, and then looks up at me meeting my eyes directly.
"Sadie is new here," she says.
I don’t say anything. I keep quiet and wait for her to say what she means.
"She came from my old practice. She is excellent at her job. She has had a very…arduous time of it lately."
I hold her gaze.
Dr. Mehta is quiet for a long moment, then she closes the cover of her tablet and slides it under her arm.
"Keep the stitches dry for another three days," she says. "Come back in a week if you want them removed here. But I’m sure you’d rather utilize your family friend."
"Thank you, Doctor." I roll my sleeve down, link the cuffs and stand, reaching for my jacket.
"Mr. Zhirinovsky."
"Yes."
"She walks home. Fourteen blocks. I don't like it, especially at night."
I give her a small nod, and she gives me a smaller one back, then she leaves the room and closes the door behind her with a soft click.
Dr. Mehta just handed me something and I'll make sure she never has cause to regret it.
I shrug my jacket back on. The pain in my arm is a dull throb I mostly ignore, because there is something more immediate to attend to, which is a blond woman who walked out of this room with her face pale and her pulse visible at the side of her throat.
She knows.
She knows it was me, and she knows it in the way a woman knows something her body has been telling her for a week that her mind has refused to hear.
I thank the front desk, declining the appointment card they try to hand me because I have no intention of making another one. I walk out of the clinic through the front entrance and turn left on the sidewalk. I walk the length of the building to the alley that runs behind it because she is not a woman who takes her breaks in a break room full of other people when she has just had the ground taken out from under her.
She's on the back step.
Her knees are drawn up and her arms are wrapped around them, and she has a juice box in one hand and a bag of candy between the thumb and forefinger of her other. Her eyes are closed.
The alley is empty otherwise. There’s a dumpster and a fire escape. A strip of pale April sky tries to squeeze between the buildings.
I stop six feet away from her.
Her eyes open.
She looks at me the way she looked at me in the sedan, except now there’s no blood on her hands and no broken glass between us. Her chin is up. Her mouth is a careful straight line. The juice box is trembling a little in her grip and she moves her hand, as if she'd rather I didn't see.
"You shouldn't be back here," she says.
"I know."
