"Tell him."
"I told him."He held her gaze."I told him the hard call gets made by him.Not by me.He took it."
She let out a breath.
"Good."
"It's not good."
"It's right.Right is different from good."
He looked at her — really looked — and she saw it land.The thing he'd been carrying since the parking lot last night, the thing he hadn't quite been able to set down, the thing that Ronan had named when he said ‘too close’.It landed.
Then he reached across the table and he put his hand over hers — palm down, fingers spread, covering the back of her hand and the fold of paper underneath it.Not the careful, tentative thing in the parking lot.Not the deliberate thing across her own table the week before.Something steadier than either.
She turned her hand over and laced her fingers through his.
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
* * *
She was the one who finally moved.
She stood up, kept hold of his hand for the half-second it took to fold the paper one more time and slide it back into her pocket, and then she let go and picked up her mug.Rinsed it at the sink the way Rose had.Set it upside down on the drying rack — beside Rose's, beside Graham's third mug, three in a row now.
"I'm making dinner tonight," she said."Six o'clock.My place.We're not talking about Monday."
"What are we talking about?"
"Anything else.Whether you floss.What your mother cooked on Sundays.The first car you bought with your own money.I don't care."She picked up her bag from the back of the chair."Show up hungry."
"Maren —"
"Six o'clock, Graham."
"I'll come."
"Good."
She walked to the door.He didn't move from the table, and she didn't look back, because the space between them already held the weight of everything they'd said and everything they hadn't — the parking lot last night, the hand on the table just now, the password folded against the curve of her hip — and looking back wasn't something she trusted herself to do without losing her place.
She walked out the screen door and down the porch steps.
The cypress trees threw long morning shadows across the yard.The gravel crunched under her shoes.She could feel him behind her in the doorway, watching the way he'd watched from parking lots and hospital corridors and the far end of hallways for three weeks.
She got in her car.Started the engine.
And then she sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, because the piece of paper in her back pocket had just changed what Monday meant, and she needed thirty seconds to let the weight of it settle before she drove.
R-Embry-NS.A username.A password.A server path.And somewhere inside the database those credentials opened, a woman named Eileen with a four-digit code who'd been moved through the same hospital twice because the people moving her thought no one was keeping count.
Maren was keeping count.
She put the car in reverse, backed out of the gravel drive, and pointed it toward home.
Chapter 19
He pulled into Maren’s driveway on Golden Acres Road at five minutes to six, killed the engine, and sat for a beat with both hands on the wheel.
