Helen watched as he wheeled the bed toward the operating room. Lex was tall and not exactly slim; yet from the way he moved, you could see he was fit and comfortable in his own skin. When he’d joined the team three years ago, he had sent a lot of the female staff into a tizzy for weeks on end. Some of the men too, for that matter. Helen had been amused by all the commotion, as had Lex himself. They soon established that they shared a sense of humor and were irritated by the same things. Helen considered herself lucky that she could now regard him as a good friend, but she took care not to spend time with him outside work.

There were limits to what a friendship between a man and a woman could bear, especially when the attraction wasn’t exclusively platonic.

2

2

“Still in bed?”

Ralf woke with a start, blinking in the bright sunlight. His mother was standing by his bed, hands on her hips. Her short, bleached hair was dark at the roots.

“Mom, it’s Saturday.”

“It’s two in the afternoon. You’ll sleep your life away at this rate.” She grabbed the covers and pulled them back.

Ralf sat up, avoiding her eyes. He could draw them from memory by now—those piercing, light-blue eyes that had regarded him with nothing but reproach for the last few years.

“Look at this mess. Really, Ralf, you need to . . .”

She continued ranting at him. Any second now, she’d start going on about his future, telling him he needed to find work. A Saturday job, at the very least—though more than anything, she’d like to see him finish his education so she could pack him off for a full workweek at some boring company with a bunch of even more boring colleagues. Her idea of a bright future. She wouldn’t rest until she’d achieved it. He didn’t dare imagine how she would react if she found out he’d stopped going to school weeks ago.

“I don’t understand how you can sleep in here,” she continued, picking up dirty clothing from the carpet and dumping it at the foot of his bed. “It stinks. Your father and I—”

“Give it a rest, Mom.”

“Don’t you take that tone with me!”

“Oh, fuck off, would you?” Ralf leapt out of bed, strode past his mother to the bathroom, slammed the door behind him, and locked it.

He took off his T-shirt and boxer shorts and stood under the shower.

As the warm water flowed over him, he thought back to when he was still in elementary school. Whenever he had a problem or felt sad, he would crawl onto his mother’s lap, and she would stroke his hair and hug him, tell him that everything would be OK and that she was proud of him.