The younger nurse said, “Do you have any stock tips for us? If you could invest in one thing, what’s guaranteed to accrue over time?”

Once he settled into the pillows, he said, “Human stupidity.”

The nurses chuckled. Odessa was jumping out of her skin. She had so much to ask him.

“He’s going for another scan,” the older nurse told her. “It’s going to be a while.”

“Is everything all right?” Odessa asked.

The nurses were mum. Patient confidentiality. They looked to Solomon.

“I had a bad test,” he said. “And these ladies will use any excuse to get me naked. How was my house?”

“Your house was fine. Fine.” The room of tapes: How could she bring it up with the nurses here? “I took Dennis.”

“Who? Oh—the fish. Right. You steal anything else? Found anything of interest?”

The nurses unplugged him from the monitors, releasing the brakes on the bed wheels.

What if something happened to him? What if it was now or never?

“I checked crime scene photos from my incident,” Odessa said. “They photographed the entire house, as you know.”

The nurses pretended not to listen, but “crime scene photos” got their antennae up.

Solomon said, “Now, how’d you get those?”

“In one of the pictures, it looks like another pot—a cauldron—in the basement behind a water heater. In Peters’s house, the one his family lived in. Hidden down there. I couldn’t see what was inside. The photographer probably thought it was a trash can or something.”

Solomon asked, “What was inside the one you did see? On Long Island?”

It was awkward saying this with the two nurses in the room. “Bones. Trash. Beads, hair. Is it some kind of shrine?”

“What kind of bones? What size?”

“I don’t know. I’m no forensic anthropologist.”

“But you know a human bone when you see it. Was it a child’s size? Or adult? It makes all the difference.”

The nurses had him ready now, but were almost hesitant to leave, fully tuned in to the conversation now. “Sorry,” said the younger nurse, to both Odessa and Solomon. “But we have to go.” They started wheeling him through the door.

Odessa said, “Both—I think. They were human bones. Some big, some small.”

“So, there, now—where would you get human bones?” asked Solomon as they wheeled him out the door and away into the hall.

At home that night, her half-eaten noodle bowl was growing cold next to her laptop.

Linus was at his desk by the window, headphones on, writing a brief, wearing the mint-green cable-knit pullover he favored on cold nights. A bit of Frank Ocean trickled out from the padding over his ears. Odessa didn’t know how he could write with music in his head. She would be singing along with the lyrics, getting nothing done.