I ignore the refrigerator, knowing there’s nothing in there worth eating. We still have electricity but it’s unreliable and often goes off for days at a time. There must still be frozen meals in the freezer because the smell is not unlike my mother’s rotten eggs. The office building even has its own shower, probably for those overweight executives trying to lose weight at lunch time. Whatever the reason, it came in handy for rinsing off the blood.

All the comforts of home without, of course, my family who would make it home.

With all the responsibilities and pressures, hardly a day has gone by when I haven’t thought I’d be happier without my family. But it turns out that’s not true. Maybe it would be if I wasn’t so worried about them. I can’t help but think how happy Paige and my mother would have been if we’d found this place together. We could have parked here for a week and pretended that everything was all right.

I feel adrift and clanless, lost and insignificant. I begin to understand what drives the new orphans to join the street gangs.

We have been here two days. Two days in which the angel has neither died nor recovered. He just lies there, sweating. I’m pretty sure he’s dying. If he wasn’t, he would have awakened by now, wouldn’t he?

I find a first aid kit under the sink, but the band aids and most of the other supplies are really meant for nothing worse than paper cuts. I rummage through the first aid box, reading the labels on the little packages. There is a bottle of aspirin. Doesn’t aspirin reduce fevers as well as get rid of a headache? I read the label, and it confirms my suspicions.

I have no idea if aspirin will work on an angel, or if his fever has anything to do with his wounds. For all I know, this could be his regular temperature. Just because he looks human doesn’t mean he is.

I walk back to the corner office with aspirin and a glass of water. The angel lies on his stomach on the black couch. I had tried to put a blanket over him that first night, but he just kept kicking it off. So now, he lies on the couch with only his pants, boots and bandages wrapped around him. I thought about taking off his pants and boots when I sprayed the blood off him in the shower, but decided that I wasn’t here to make him comfortable.

His black hair is plastered to his forehead. I try to get him to swallow some pills and drink some water but I can’t wake him enough to do anything. He just lies there like a burning piece of rock, totally unresponsive.

“If you don’t drink this water, I’m just going to leave you here to die alone.”

His bandaged back moves up and down serenely, just as it’s been doing for the last two days.