Page 147 of Never Alone
He nodded.
That was the whole conversation.
But I stood there a long time after, with my eyes on the mantel and the photographs that were not of me, while the room moved around us, and I didn't move.
Quinn found me on the porch later.
I had stepped out for the cold. The pain meds were working again, and I wanted air to come with the working. The street was quiet. The light was failing toward evening. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked at nothing in particular and then wentquiet. The cold had a wet edge to it, the February kind that found the spaces between your collar and your skin.
She came out and stood beside me at the porch rail. She had a mug in one hand and nothing in the other. She didn't offer me the mug. She knew I would not have lifted it with the sling, and she knew offering it without thinking would have been a small humiliation neither of us needed.
Quinn looked out at the street for a long count before she said it.
"I've never seen you hurt before. Not like that."
I let that one go past me. The cold was finding the gap between my collar and my neck. I didn't adjust the collar.
"You saw me after Shelby."
She was quiet for a beat. Then she shook her head, still not looking at me.
"That was different. That was your heart. This was your body. I didn't know what to do."
She’d said it to the street. Not to me.
I let the silence hold a count. I wanted to say the thing I was about to say. I wanted it to come out the way it had been sitting in my chest since the back of the rig.
"You held my hand."
"That's not medicine."
I looked over at her. She was still looking at the street.
"It was for me."
She didn't answer that.
The wind moved in the tree at the corner of the yard. Her mug had stopped steaming. Down the street, a man called his dog, and the dog came, the kind of small, ordinary thing that kept happening while everything else changed.
After a moment, she said, "They pulled me off the call."
"Good." It came out before I thought about it.
She turned her head an inch toward me. Not enough to be looking. Enough to be hearing.
"I wanted to work you."
I had known that. I had known it from the moment I heard her voice in the back of the rig. The voice she used when she was working a call. Flat. Fast. All medicine.
"I know. Good thing you couldn't."
She looked at me. She had the face she had when she was making herself say something. Quinn had a small set of expressions, and that one was the one I had seen on her exactly three times in our lives. Each one had cost her something I had not been able to give back.
"If you'd died on me, I wouldn't have come back from that."
"I know."
She didn't look away.
