Page 48 of Patch

We stayed like that a long while, still joined, his arms around me and my forehead on his shoulder and the afternoon going orange through the window.

His hand came up and found my wrist. His fingers settled over my pulse and counted, the way he does. One and two and three.

“Ninety-two,” he said.

“That’s low for me.”

“I know it is. That’s why I counted.”

I lifted my head and looked at him properly for the first time since I’d walked in that door.

“You knew,” I said. “When you came out to the car. You already knew how the interview went.”

“Surge had Whitlock’s calendar. I knew what time you went in and I knew what time you came out. I could do the rest of it from how long you sat in the parking lot before you started the car.”

“And you asked me if I’d eaten.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

He thought about it long enough that I knew the answer was going to be honest.

“Because a woman with a lanyard spent an hour this morning asking you the same question four different ways to see which answer changed.” His thumb moved on my wrist. “I figured you could stand one question you could answer wrong and nothing would come of it.”

I put my forehead back down on his shoulder, because my eyes had gone hot and I wasn’t going to do that in front of him.

He let me. His hand came up and settled on the back of my neck and stayed there, warm and heavy, and neither of us said anything for a while.

The Whitlock card was in my jacket pocket on the floor. Gerry’s face was lingering in my mind. A blank line in section four sat out there in the car, patient as anything.

“You can say it,” he said eventually. “Whatever you’ve been holding.”

“He hired me because I couldn’t quit.”

“I know.”

“He knew about my grandmother. I told him in the interview and I thought it was why he gave me the job.” My voice did something I didn’t authorize. “It was.”

His arm tightened around me. “He was wrong about you.”

“He wasn’t. That’s the thing I keep trying to tell you. He read me exactly right.”

“He read what you’d put up with.” His arm didn’t move. “He never once found out what you’d do about it. Neither have you.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“It isn’t meant to be comforting.” I felt him say it more than I heard it, his chest moving under my cheek. “It’s meant to be true.”

Chapter Eleven

Patch

Dread took the drain out of Freak’s shoulder in the common room on a Saturday afternoon with the television going, and Maren assisted, and I stood in the doorway pretending to be on my way somewhere.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. Not the clinic. Not the blood or the medication or forty minutes with a man open on a table. A Saturday, a television, and a drain bag.

“Output’s under five,” she said. “It can come out.”