Daylight

You fell asleep with the phone on your chest and woke up with her last message still on the screen.

You read the whole thread again at the kitchen table while your father hunts for his good shoes. It's strange, seeing it in daylight. The numbered lists. The way the lists stopped being lists somewhere around two in the morning. You don't know what you're going to tell Fallon. You're not sure you know what you told Gwenllian.

You save her number, finally. You type Gwenllian, and then you check the spelling against Dru's voice in your head, and then you delete it and type Doc, because she'll never see it and it makes you smile.

"Shoes," your father announces, holding them up. "Let's go see the heart people, Ethan."

Tremont Harbor Medical Center is twelve stories of glass on the Cambridge side of the river, and the main entrance is a new wing that looks like it was designed to win an award. Glass walls. A three-story atrium. A living wall of ferns somebody has to water with a ladder.

Etched into the glass above the doors: THE PEVERELL PAVILION.

"Fancy," your father mutters. "I paid for those ferns."

The cardiology clinic runs forty minutes late. You sit in a plastic chair beside him while he reads every pamphlet on the rack out loud, and when the nurse finally calls his name and says the doctor wants a quick echo downstairs, you end up walking him to an elevator that lets you out, by mistake, one floor too low.

Emergency.

It hits you before you understand where you are. Noise first: a monitor alarm, a man shouting in Portuguese, somebody's phone ringing and ringing. Then the light, flat and white and everywhere. Then a gurney coming through double doors fast, two paramedics running beside it, and a voice you know saying, "Trauma two. Go."

She's at the head of the gurney.

Navy scrubs. A paper cap over that black knot of hair. A stethoscope around her neck and a pen in her teeth that she takes out to point. You barely recognize her and you'd recognize her anywhere.

"Fall from height, twenty feet, roofer, GCS fourteen," a paramedic says.

"Thank you. Ignacy, I want a FAST scan. Philippa, two large-bore lines. Somebody call blood bank and tell them I'm being polite for the last time." She doesn't raise her voice. She doesn't have to. Eight people move like she's pulling their strings.

Your father stops beside you, leaning on his cane, watching.

"Who's that?"

"Nobody."

"That's not nobody. Look at that." He sounds awed. "That's a general."

The trauma bay doors are glass. You watch her through them without meaning to. She's the stillest thing in the room. Everybody else is moving and she stands at the center with her hands on the man's chest, listening to something nobody else can hear, and then she says one word and everybody changes direction.

A resident beside the nurses' station whispers to another one. "Pendrake's on. Thank God."

"Thank God for him. I'm terrified of her."

"Everyone's terrified of her. Did you see her at the holiday party? She came in, looked at the punch, and left."

"I'd let her look at me like that."

They giggle and scatter when a man in a white coat comes around the corner.

He's the kind of handsome that makes you look twice to see if it's real. Mid-thirties, dark blond hair pushed back, blue eyes, a jaw that belongs on a recruitment poster. His coat says DR. E. PEVERELL, CHIEF OF TRAUMA SURGERY in red stitching. He walks straight into the trauma bay and puts his hand on Gwenllian's elbow, light and familiar, and leans down to say something in her ear.

She doesn't shake him off.

You find you're gripping your father's arm too hard.

"Ow," he says.

"Sorry."

The echo is fine. The cardiologist is pleased. Your father charms two nurses and a woman at the parking validation desk, and you're crossing the atrium toward the exit when you see the wall.

It's a donor wall, the kind every hospital has. Names engraved on glass panels by how much they gave. And above it, in the center, a portrait in oils taller than you.

A man in his sixties. Silver hair. A navy suit cut so well it looks painted on. A pleasant face with nothing behind it, like a very expensive window. He's handsome in the way a statue is handsome. A brass plate underneath reads:

GARVAN PEVERELL
CHAIRMAN, BOARD OF TRUSTEES
"Every patient, every dollar, every day."

"Every dollar," your father says. "That I believe."

"Sit here a second, Pop. I need the bathroom."

You don't need the bathroom. You saw her.

She's crossing the far end of the atrium with a coffee and a tablet, fast, head down. You catch up with her by the stairwell door. She hears your steps and turns, and her face does the same thing it did when Fallon said Kovach.

"No," she says.

"Hi to you too."

She grabs your sleeve, pulls you through the stairwell door, and lets it bang shut behind you. Concrete stairs, a red EXIT sign, the hum of the building around you. She lets go of your sleeve like it burned her.

"What are you doing here, Ethan?"

"My dad has a heart. It needed checking."

"Here." Her voice is low and fierce. "Of all the hospitals in Boston."

"This is the one that sent us the bill." You lean against the railing. "You were good in there. With the roofer."

"I'm always good in there. That's not the point." She closes her eyes for half a second. "Don't come here, Ethan. Not to find me. Not ever. If you see me in this building, you don't know me."

"Because I'm a fighter?"

"Because of whose building it is."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She doesn't answer. She looks at the eyebrow instead. Old habit. She reaches up and almost touches it and stops herself with her fingers an inch from your face.

"Did you tell Fallon yes?"

"Not yet."

"Don't." It comes out almost like please. "Whatever she's paying you. Don't fight Kovach."

"Why?"

"Because the last man who fought him isn't walking." Her voice doesn't change at all, which is somehow worse. "He's thirty-one. He lives in Revere with his mother. I put a drain in his skull at three in the morning and I visit him on Thursdays and he doesn't know who I am."

You don't have anything to say to that.

Her phone buzzes in her scrub pocket. Then again. She pulls it out, glances at it, and the screen is tilted toward you just enough. You aren't trying to read it. You read it anyway.

The sender is two initials. G.P.

Your new favorite signs Wednesday. Don't make me remind you.

She sees you see it. All the color goes out of her face for the second time in three days. And upstairs, through the stairwell door, someone is calling Dr. Pendrake to trauma one, Dr. Pendrake to trauma one, and she doesn't move.