What did that leave him with, then? Some kind of random industrial accident that none of them could’ve predicted? Had Snow gotten free with the devil’s own luck?

Mike’s breath caught in his throat. The image flashed through his mind of Snow lying on the table in the scan room, eyes like broken bottle shards looking up from the bars of the head coil. He hadn’t looked sick then.

Something’s here.

Another thought whipsawed through his mind, almost too fast to catch. Where were Sarah and Eli right now? Still in the hospital waiting for him?

Find a phone and call her cell. Just to make sure.

Would she even talk to him at this point?

After his first affair was discovered five years ago, Mike’s father had given him his only piece of advice on the matter of infidelity. She might say she forgives you, Mike, and if she does, then you need to take her at her word. But don’t ever expect her to forget, and don’t be surprised if someday she takes the kid and leaves for good.

Yeah, but now?

He was standing in the stairwell doorway, facing the long, empty corridor that ran past the emergency room to the main lobby and admissions and, if he followed it far enough, the chapel, which Calhoun had once told him was the oldest part of the entire building. The chapel was the only remaining part of the original structure, put up back in 1887. The building would close tomorrow, and Mike had never even gone back there.

Slowly, like a man who’d realized he’d ventured too deep into the woods and lost his way, he turned and looked in the other direction, toward the gift shop and the cafeteria. He knew this place, had logged hundreds of hours here, day and night. But this was different. Right now the emptiness was absolute, almost surreal. He thought for no good reason of the vacation he and Sarah had taken to Germany six years ago, when they’d taken a bus trip to Dachau: the wide white walls and empty rooms, the endless corridors and gaping ovens.

It was as if something terrible had happened inside this place, too, something so horrific that every living thing had taken flight. The heavy sheets of plywood that had been nailed up over the windows only reinforced the feeling of isolation. For the first time it occurred to him that the perfect silence of it was eerie.

Don’t start that shit now, Mikey. You do not need it right now, trust me.

“Find a phone,” he said aloud, and though he wouldn’t have admitted it, even the sound of his own voice was a comfort. “Just find a phone, call her, and pray she answers…”

Because you’re an asshole and you don’t deserve her. Does Hallmark make a card that says that?

Moving swiftly up the hall, he passed the east elevators and the door leading to the ER off to his left. It had never occurred to him to take the elevator down from the sixth floor. He’d always been told to avoid them in case of a fire—plus there was that brief but bizarre power failure in the elevator on their way up.