“I didn’t mean to.” Shaw knew what he was saying over and over again, and he knew it wasn’t even really the truth because what made everything so horrible was that he had meant to, at the end. He had meant all of it. It had been North’s life on the line, and so Shaw had meant it, no matter how much he wished he hadn’t.

And then he couldn’t seem to say anything, and he kept shaking. He tried to tell North that maybe he was having a seizure, maybe it was adult-onset epilepsy because the shaking was so bad, but he couldn’t even manage that much. All he could do was let North draw him down onto the couch, let North drag him against his chest, let North’s hand turn Shaw’s face into his chest where the smell of Irish Spring and American Crew bloomed, let North’s fingers tremble between his shoulder blades, and shake and shake and shake until it seemed the most unfair thing in the entire universe was that Shaw couldn’t fall apart completely, couldn’t just shake apart until he ceased to exist.

Chapter 35

North rode with him to the hospital. He sat with him in the exam room, where the paper curtain rustled every time someone walked by. The past occupant had left a distinct smell of clove cigarettes. From time to time, North would twist around, checking the wall behind them as though expecting to catch someone sneaking. From time to time, North would grab part of Shaw—his shoulder, his upper arm, his thigh—his fingers clamping down so tightly that they left livid impressions when North finally seemed to realize what he was doing and pulled his hand away. And then, a few minutes later, he would do it again.

“It’s too late,” Shaw said.

North’s head whipped toward him.

Jerking a thumb at the poster behind them, Shaw said, “You’ve definitely already got HPV.”

A million emotions constellated on North’s face. Then he started to cry, turning his head away and wiping his eyes. It only lasted a moment, and before Shaw could figure out what to say, North cleared his throat and flicked tears from his fingers and said, visibly trying to sound like he always did, “Just thank God they don’t have to inspect that fucking Erie Canal you call an asshole.”

North stayed with Shaw through all the questions. He didn’t say anything—Shaw appreciated that—but he stayed, listened, nodded his head. Once, when a bumbling nurse dropped the lidocaine solution, North shot to his feet, making a sound in his throat that on Animal Planet they would have called a growl, and the poor, white-boy nurse shot out of the room and an older black woman had to come and finish the job. North stayed through the stitches. North stayed until the curtain twitched back and Detectives Barr and Reck came into the room.

When they asked North to leave, it turned into World War III. At first it was all three of them going at it, ferocious whispers that escalated into hard, jabbing demands, swooping up into half-voiced shouts. By the time Barr dropped out of the match, Reck and North were shouting in each other’s faces, bumping chests, looking more like two guys about to step into a cage match than anything else. It ended with Reck doing some sort of fancy cop move and getting North’s arm twisted behind him and marching North out of the exam room.