"Thank you," she says.

He cocks an eyebrow. She doesn't usually thank him.

"We have to bring Ingersoll in on this." She throws him her phone. "Call him."

"But he likes you best."

"Call him."

"Shit."

He picks up the cell.

FOURTEEN

Terminal

Miriam stands in the thick of it.

It's night. She's no longer sure what time. She smells the stink of exhaust as another bus comes and goes, purging its people like a bulimic, then gorging on more. Across the way, sitting on a blue bench is Ashley, who makes an impatient roll of his index finger to say, move, move, move.

Once more, she thinks of running. Maybe just get on a bus and go; not like she hasn't done it before. Her feet stay glued. She's not sure why.

(You like him. You like this. You deserve this.)

The Charlotte downtown bus terminal looks not unlike a giant airplane hangar – open air, big arched canopy, skylights allowing a faint glow from the moon above. It makes her feel very small.

She wades into the crowd, hands out.

Same plan as the last hour, and the hour before that, and the hour before that – her hands graze the hands of others, or she touches an exposed shoulder as someone passes. She takes a step, and –

Three years from now, the woman grips the edges of the hospital bed, soaked with sweat, pushing, pushing, trying to push a bowling ball out a gap the size of a small fist, and the child crowns, a meager mop of wet black hair already on the baby's empurpled head, and the face is out now, and it's covered in something that looks like red ambrosia salad, but then the vitals start going crazy, and a doctor who looks more than a little like Sulu from Star Trek says something about an "obstetrical hemorrhage." A gush of blood, the woman screams, the baby slides out, a raft on red, and flat-line.

Miriam blinks away the image. She steadies herself. Not like she hasn't done this before. She's amazed at how many hospitals she's inadvertently seen the inside of. She lets her bare shoulder brush the shoulder of a man in a tank-top as he reaches in to hug his wife –

The man is alone, thirty-three years from now, in a hospital. He's bald. The cancer's all through him, like rats in the walls. He sits in a chair in the corner and he reaches over to the bedside table and finds a bottle of pills there, and he counts out one, then two, then pauses. He regards these two pills and finally just upends the bottle into his hand and gets maybe two dozen of them, all of which he swallows. He sits there for a while, not feeling anything, just staring at the floor tile, the ceiling, his face looking woefully alone, and he starts to cry; a numbness creeps in around the edges. His head droops. Jaw slackens. Drool oozes. And then