“Miss Faulkner?” The nice nurse is back. “We’re gonna take good care of your uncle. Y’all need to let us do our jobs now. That’s right, we’ve got him …” Somehow they have eased past me and have surrounded Uncle Gavin’s bed. I step back, still wiping tears from my eyes. Uncle Gavin doesn’t take his eyes off of mine, even when they start rolling his bed out of the room with him in it. Then he is out the door and down the hall, and I’m left in an empty hospital room with Ethan, holding a whiteboard and a dry-erase marker, staring at the open doorway like the answers to all the questions in my head are on the other side.

ETHAN AND I sit in the same waiting room we were in yesterday. Across from us sits an old woman in a faded blue dress, her gaze on the floor, while a younger, balding man next to her murmurs in her ear. She nods every once in a while but doesn’t look at the man, who I’m guessing by the resemblance is her son. She just keeps staring at the floor, communing with her own grief and worry.

As much as I’m worried about Uncle Gavin’s surgery, I don’t want to think about it. If I can’t do anything to affect the outcome, I have to focus my energies somewhere else. Right now, I’m thinking about the two messages Uncle Gavin wrote on the whiteboard. Dont trust FBI is at least straightforward, although the reasoning behind my uncle’s warning isn’t. Of course he wouldn’t have a close relationship with the FBI—they’d like nothing more than to arrest him and throw him in prison. But he was very specific: he didn’t trust the FBI with Tane. Or he doesn’t want me to trust them. Agent Scott clearly dislikes my uncle. I wonder if Special Agent Rondeau might be more open to a conversation, although at this point I’m not sure how that would go, or what the point would be. Hey, Alisha, wanna help me find the guy I lied to you about and said I didn’t know? Maybe if I could talk to her without her partner, I’d learn something. Meeting her for coffee in a public setting could work, although there would be a lot of variables I couldn’t control—other customers, potential FBI agents pretending to be customers or passersby, traffic. Talking to her in private might be better, if I could surprise her without freaking her out or getting arrested. Figure out where she lives, tail her to her house or apartment or whatever.