Susan made a sound somewhere between a giggle and a sob and hunched over Archie. His skin was clammy and mottled. His eyes were still half open and unseeing. How could someone bleed that much and survive? There were two red fingerprints on his neck where Gretchen had touched him. Susan pressed her own fingertips on top of the spots. Her heart was pounding so hard it was difficult to detect anything else. Then she felt it—a faint pulse. Susan started to cry.

“Keep him warm,” Gretchen said, sweeping past Susan and plucking the ring of keys off the floor. She pocketed the keys, produced a nurse’s cap, and began affixing the cap to the top of her blond head.

Gretchen was leaving. The thought flooded Susan with relief, followed by an immediate knot of dread. Gretchen was going to leave her here with Archie. But Susan didn’t know what to do, how to take care of him. Keep him warm? With what?

“This was fun,” Gretchen said gaily. She frowned a little. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next year to top it.” She gave Susan a curt smile, stood up a little straighter, and stepped through the door.

Susan looked helplessly at the empty space where Gretchen had been. “Wait,” she said weakly. But the word was swallowed by the sound of the power tools.

For a moment, Susan couldn’t move. She didn’t know how to take care of someone. She couldn’t even take care of herself. She couldn’t lay him down—she’d hurt him, make it worse. She had told Jeff Heil he wouldn’t die. She had said it again and again as he slipped away in her arms. She was supposed to take care of Pearl, and look what had happened to her.

Then Susan’s eyes fell on a round metal object on the floor by Archie’s hip, near her knee. It looked like it had fallen out of Archie’s pocket. Reflexively, Susan snatched it up. She thought it was a pillbox. But when she pressed the little latch, the top popped up revealing the face of a compass. The hand was trembling, pointing north.

Don’t worry about the direction. Just move.