I reached out and brushed Ray’s forehead, above his uninjured eye, smoothing his brown hair back. “Do whatever they tell you, so they’ll let you go,” I whispered, and turned away before he could reply.

The corridor outside the ICU was so clean, the walls shone with faint reflections.

“Thank God, right?” said Alicia beside me. “He looks good.”

I nodded, still unable to speak.

“You don’t think so?” she said, and shook her head. “He’ll be up and gone the first chance he gets.”

27

“YOU MUST BE DYING TO get back into your bungalow,” Yegina said, staring at my sublet’s jumble of furniture, the photos of empty sidewalks. She had come over with two towering bags of premade meals, convinced that my battered right hand had made me incapable of shopping or cooking.

“It hasn’t been that bad here. Just lonely.” I cleared my table of a bouquet of orange lilies from Janis Rocque so that Yegina could set her parcels down. The bouquet had appeared the day after Nelson’s arrest and was already almost a week old, but I couldn’t throw it out. Petals and pollen scattered over the counter.

Yegina stood close to me, swiping up the petals with her long-fingered open hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve been so caught up with my job and Hiro, I just let you drift.”

“I think I needed to drift,” I said. “Not from you, but from who I was.”

Yegina stopped swiping and looked at me. “And now?”

I sat down on the huge blue couch. Yegina dropped the petals in the trash and perched beside me, her black-trousered knees beside my jeans. She put a hand on my arm.

“Don’t make me call your mother,” she said. “She’ll pry it out of you.”

I hadn’t called my mother at all yet. I didn’t want to tell my parents what had happened in the past two weeks. They would fly out, the two of them this time, and demand I choose a different life.

“I’m quitting the Rocque,” I said. “I want to work full-time on the story of Brenae Brasil. I have so much reporting to do, and I need to find an editor who will work with me.” I faced her. “Janis paid me enough for my gallerina gig that I can live for three or four months. And then, who knows. I’ll find other freelance work.”

“Does Janis know?”

“I’m going to meet her tomorrow.”