Again, I wondered what had happened to him.

“We need to process the paperwork and get some more insurance info.”

Blithe’s parents had sent tilted photos of their insurance documents, which I’d printed on the S-H’s printer. I handed them over.

We sat down to wait. I tethered my phone and saw a text from Margot’s friend, the surgeon. I told her where we were.

Thirty minutes later, an older butch woman with a buzzed head and orthopedic loafers walked in. I assumed she was an Operatrix.

“What’s going on in here?” she said bombastically.

We stared.

As if responding to her energy, Blithe awoke. “Two people took me from my home,” he said.

“Blithe, holy shit.” Aiden turned to him.

“Is one of you Penfield?” the woman said.

“Yea, me, oh, you’re—”

“Margot’s friend. Natalie. Nat.”

I could not mentally link the person in the room to Margot.

She hated masculine women!

“Hey, thanks for coming to find me.”

I did not have time to do a complete historical revision of my childhood and Margot’s responses to my feeble attempts at masculinity.

“He’s no longer unconscious and it seems like this is more of a mental than physical thing,” I said apologetically.

“No difference. No difference whatsoever. I should know from all the fat, stressed, angry, loveless men whose hearts I’m supposed to unblock.”

Wow. I was crushing, too, aside from her fatphobia.

“Well, any advice for him?”

“Keep him close,” she said, walking over to his bedside, where he was glancing around the room. “I have to go, but here’s my card. I’d love to get coffee and hear about how you’re doing. Margot has told me a lot about you.”

She what? I had this whole story about how I was this obnoxious kid always ruining her career and moments of solitude with my needs.

I took the card and put it right behind my subway pass in my wallet. She squeezed my shoulder.

Something passed from her into me and she left.

“Two people. Took me from my home.”

I went to Blithe and sat at the end of the bed. “We know, we know. We’re sorry, Blithe, but you would have ended up in the Shadowlands anyway,” I said as his legs thrashed around under the covers.

“No, not you two,” he said, and closed his eyes.

Blithe was cranky and itchy when we got back to my apartment, demanding that we let him go home, to his real home. Aiden had to go to a meeting, and I dreaded being left alone with the patient, who had gone from subdued to unconscious to unmoored.

“What’s your real home?” I asked him in the living room, and he stared at me in disgust.

“They know, but they’ll never tell you.”

In the kitchen, I crushed up some Xanax and mixed it into his hummus, which I served with carrot sticks.