Chapter 2
Series 1 Chapter 2
Denise Whitlock has been the night charge nurse in that emergency room longer than the building has been standing.
She looked up when I came through and did not say one word about the dress.
"You're not on tonight."
"I know."
"You look like a wedding."
"Chamber dinner."
She went back to her screen. "Coffee's from six."
---
I did not go to the coffee.
There is an alcove by the vending machines where you can see the check-in desk through the glass.
Brady was at that desk with his back to me.
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The nurse doing check-in asked the questions in the same flat, kind voice she uses for everyone.
"Any chance you're pregnant?"
"Yes." Shelby's voice, higher than I remembered it.
"How far along?"
"Seven weeks."
"Any bleeding?"
"A little. Since about eight."
"Okay. Who's your OB doctor?"
A pause.
"I don't have one yet. We just found out."
We.
---
"And you are?" the nurse asked.
That is the next question on the form. I have asked it myself four thousand times.
"I'm the father," Brady said.
---
He could have said boyfriend. He could have said friend.
He picked the one word he could never take back.
He said it in a normal voice, at a desk, in a building where my badge opens four different doors.
He said it like it had been true for a long time and everybody already knew.
Everybody except me.
---
They took her back to bay nine.
I went down to the staff locker room and sat on the bench in front of my own locker in a cocktail dress and got out my phone.
---
When something happens to you, there is a person you call. You do not decide who. Your thumb already knows.
I scrolled through that phone for a long time.
My mother has been gone six years. My sister Callie is in Tacoma and it was past midnight there. Denise was forty feet away and she would have come, and then I would have had to work beside her for the next ten years being the woman she felt sorry for.
Everybody else in that phone, I knew through him.
---
Nine years. Forty employees. Two hundred houses. A company, a truck, a suit that hung in the closet with the tags still on it, waiting for a night that deserved it.
And when I went looking for one person to tell, the only name my thumb found was the man in bay nine.
---
I put the phone in my locker and did the arithmetic.
Nine years of keeping his nights clean.
Not one night in all of it that he had kept clean for me.
---
I clipped my badge back on over the dress and went out to the desk, because there was one more thing I needed to know.
Denise had the patient board up.
Bay nine had a name in it.
RENNER, S. — 34F — BLEEDING / 7 WK — ADMIT
"They're keeping her?"
"OB wants her upstairs overnight. Probably a small bleed behind the placenta. It's common. She's just scared."
"Upstairs where?"
"Three east."
---
I did not say anything.
Denise looked at me over her glasses for a long moment.
"You want to tell me why you're standing in my department in a formal at midnight?"
"Not tonight."
"All right." She let it go, which is why I have loved her for ten years. "Go home. You look like hell in a nice dress."
---
His truck was still in the lot.
I sat in my car with my hands on the wheel and the engine off for eleven minutes.
Then I drove home and slept four hours on top of the covers.
---
At twenty to seven, my phone buzzed with the shift text. The way it does. The way it has every week for nine years.
3 EAST — 0700 — ROOMS 12 TO 18.
Bay nine had gone up to three east.
She was in fifteen.