Page 95 of The Lonely Road

taya

County Memorial is the kind of hospital that knows what it is—small, underfunded, and quietly doing what a county hospital does without making a fuss.

The parking lot is half full at this hour on a Tuesday morning.

I am out of the Wrangler before Mason can fully stop it.

Mac is on the second floor.

He’s sitting up when I come through the door, which is the first good sign, because a man who’s sitting up is a man who’s trying to win the argument with the nursing staff.

He has a bandage at the back of his head, a saline drip in one arm, and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead like he was in the middle of something when all this happened.

“About time,” he says.

“You’re supposed to be resting, not reading…hell, Mac, is that the Whitman file?”

“I’ll rest when I’m dead.” He squints past my shoulder. “Is that Brooks?”

“Yes.” Mac watches him for a long moment from the doorway.

“I only managed to get some of the pages.” He lifts it up. “But you have everything on the cloud, too.”

“I do.”

I have backups of backups of backups. But this isn’t about losing files—this is about someone reading through our plans and process.

“I don’t know yet what they took. Wiley walked me through. There’s damage.” I sit on the edge of the chair beside the bed. “Mac. What were you doing there?”

“Couldn’t sleep. I was going through the augmentation records you needed for the supplemental brief.” He shrugs carefully, like his body is warning him not to move too quickly. “I heard the back window and went to look.”

“You should have called Wiley.”

“I should have run faster,” he mutters. “Same difference.”

I put my hand over his on the blanket. He lets me.

Before I can probe him further, the room fills up faster than I expect.

Joy arrives first—she must have heard from someone at the Horseshoe who heard from Eunice who heard from whoever was on Main Street when the tape went up.

She glances at his blanket with disgust and pulls out a cashmere one from her bag. She removes the hospital issue without asking for permission and puts the new one on top of Mac.

“I could’ve been naked underneath,” he complains, but touches the fabric with appreciation.

Joy wiggles her eyebrows. “You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen before.”

“What I have down there is potent and not for young eyes,” Mac grumbles.

He’s in a good mood; that’s a good thing.

A very good thing.

Mav comes in behind her with Duke, and the room changes the way it always changes when those two men are in it. They have the gravity of people who have been anchoring this community long enough that their presence grounds.

Amos Langley arrives with the worst coffee in the world from the vending machine. He hands one to Mason without being asked. Mason takes it without looking at what it is.

He then gives each of us a cup, but not Mac.