With mammoth effort, he extended his hand as far into the darkness as it would go, reaching out and down until he felt the door, applying pressure until it opened with an awful, disruptive squawk.

He stepped through. The dark felt cooler here. Mike put out his arm and moved it to the right until he felt the wall of the ground floor. Flattening himself against it, he crept forward in those same slow and silent steps. His throat felt as if someone had reached down and swabbed every drop of moisture from it.

Up and to the right, he brushed against a hard-edged shape protruding from the wall at face level. One finger traced the edge of what was engraved there and slowly he recognized the letter M.

And beside it, R.

And then I.

He found the door handle, cold in the dark, and twisted it open. This time the hinges were silent, as he’d known they would be. He oiled them himself, spraying them regularly with a can of WD-40 kept under the sink. He had expected that silence would make him feel better but it didn’t.

The little waiting area could not have been more than fifteen feet to the other side. Trying to envision it in his mind, Mike strode quickly across, his panic gnawing through the compartment in his mind where he’d managed to contain it up until now. He began flailing his hands for the inner door, the one going into the MRI suite, seizing the knob and yanking it, knocking over a chair. It fell with a crash and his face went numb with dread.

“Fuck,” he said. “Oh, fuck.” Now everything in the darkness sounded too loud. He spun around, heard papers shuffling under his feet, something tinkling, and plunged both hands into absolute blackness until they bumped off the counter. Here was the cold metal of the sink, a pile of Tupperware clattering down, the microwave, until he felt the drawer. Mike pulled it open.

The flashlight won’t be here. After all this, it won’t—

But of course it was, and he found its shape almost immediately with both hands and switched it on. A strong and solid bar of light shone across the room in front of him and Mike heard himself exhale with relief so deep it seemed to come from his toes upward.

He shined the light deep into the block of empty space. Seeing that the suite truly was empty, that Frank Snow was not down here waiting for him with a scalpel or a bone saw, Mike felt himself becoming calmer, becoming more himself again.

He took a step forward and stopped cold.

To his immediate right, resting on the floor amid the pile of papers that he’d just kicked over, was a cell phone and a brown leather key chain. Mike recognized both instantly. He’d bought the key chain for Sarah for their first anniversary, when she’d jokingly asked for a Coach bag that she knew they couldn’t afford. Mike had wrapped it up in a big box and given it to her, and they’d laughed and made love all that night.