Not a muscle spasm. Susan didn’t know how, but she knew it to be true without hesitation. This was something different. Something intentional. His jaw opened. His chest—which had seemed so sunken and pale, so decrepit—expanded and lifted. His skin flushed.

“He’s breathing,” someone said.

Susan felt hot tears running down her cheeks. If Henry lived through this, she would listen to him, she wouldn’t get in the way, she’d be less annoying.

Please, God. I promise.

“We’ve got a heartbeat,” someone else said. “It’s getting stronger.”

Susan turned toward Archie and Claire and grinned, wiping her face with her sleeve. They had heard. Archie was already helping Claire to her feet.

Susan’s phone rang. She knew who it was. She reached into her purse and turned off the volume.

Chapter 15

CHAPTER

15

Archie was used to pain. There was the physical pain—the ribs that still ached where Gretchen had broken them, the acid that burned deep in his throat where the poison Gretchen had fed him had eaten through his esophagus. He’d mostly learned to live with it. He’d taught himself not to take deep breaths, to sit up when he ate, to sleep on his back. The emotional pain had taken longer. But he could look at himself in the mirror now, scars and all. He could spend time with his children without the crushing weight of guilt that clung to him like a smell.

There was always pain.

The trick was to make it part of you.

The machine inhaling and exhaling for Henry made breathing sound easy. Steady, strong. Each breath exactly the same as the last. You could trick yourself into taking that kind of breathing for granted.

It was eleven P.M., and the hospital was quiet. They’d moved Henry to the ICU, a land without doors, where all the patient rooms had three walls and were open to a central area, like a hospital dollhouse or a TV sitcom set. Everything in there was made out of molded tan plastic that reminded Archie of school cafeteria trays. Speckled linoleum floors; a soap pump and paper towel dispenser on the wall above a sink. The effect was part cheap motel, part public restroom.

Archie was sitting there in sweatpants and a sweatshirt borrowed from some hospital storeroom, his own clothes a wet bundle in a plastic bag at his feet, next to his coat.

The ecosystem had been restored, everything was in order.

Henry was alive for now, heart beating, blood pumping. But the tox screens hadn’t turned up anything yet, so there was nothing the doctors could do but try to keep Henry breathing until his body fought off whatever was shutting it down. Archie wasn’t about to sit around and wait for Henry’s heart to stop again.