Page 78 of The Forbidden Center

“Anything else?”

“The entry in the second period. You stopped turning the trunk to cover for the shoulder.”

He smiles slowly. “You’ve gotten dangerous with film.”

“I was always dangerous with film.”

“There she is.”

The phrase warms something that has no business warming in a treatment room.

I close the chart. “Final assessment on the twenty-third.”

“I know.”

He folds the revised sheet into his bag, and neither of us says anything at all about what happens after it.

At the back door I turn off the corridor lights while he waits with my work bag in his hand.

“I can carry that.”

“I know. You handed it to me.”

“You were standing there.”

“Romantic.”

I stop with my hand on the alarm panel. He grins at me. I enter the code.

Outside, the cold finds the gap between my coat and my scarf. The lot is nearly empty, his car is two rows over, mine is under the lamp by the fence, and we walk toward it without touching and I am aware of the distance the entire way.

At the truck he puts my bag on the passenger seat and steps back out of the door’s arc.

He gives me room.

That should make leaving easy, and I keep one hand on the open door instead.

“How is Mack?”

Colt looks at me. “Better question than how’s the shoulder.”

“I have already asked about the shoulder.”

“Fair.”

He tells me Mack came to dinner on Sunday and criticized the rice while eating two bowls of it, and that he has been invited back and does not know it yet.

I laugh, and the sound goes nowhere in the cold, and his keys stop turning around his finger.

Neither of us moves. There is no table here and no chart and no reason at all for his attention to be where it is.

“Astrid.”

My name is the whole of what he says.

I could get into the truck. Instead I catch the edge of his jacket near the zipper and then flatten my hand against his chest, and the fabric is cold and he is not, and he goes entirely still under my palm.

I pull him closer. Not far. Enough.