CHAPTER 4 Another Man’s Name

(Nate’s POV)

The doctors finished talking but I didn’t move.

My grandmother was on a ventilator. She might wake up. She might not. The smoke had done what smoke does. Every hour she stayed under was an hour she might not come back from.

That was what the resident said. The resident was twenty-eight years old and trying not to cry.

I said, “Thank you.” That was what you said.

I walked back to the waiting room.

Alexis was on her phone, half-folded into a green plastic chair. She had been there for the consultation. She had wept very prettily for the resident, who had patted her shoulder. Now she was on the phone with—who knew. A friend, maybe, or her trainer. Possibly one of her brothers.

My wife had set fire to a curtain in a room with my grandmother sleeping in it.

That was the sentence I kept turning over. It would not soften.

Three years I had let Sabrina live in my house. Three years I had paid for her uncle’s hospital, her aunt’s rent, the prescription she filled monthly without telling me what was wrong.

I had been generous. I had been patient. I had married her, for fuck’s sake! I had given her my name and a credit card and a guest room with a view of the lake.

She had paid me back by trying to burn my grandmother alive.

I sat down across from Alexis.

She was saying, “—and the doctors don’t know if she’ll wake up, can you imagine, my brothers are going to lose their minds, you know how Eric is about grandmothers—”

She saw me and lowered her voice but did not hang up.

“Hold on, darling, my Nate needs me.” A pause. “I love you too.”

She tucked herself against my arm. Her belly was a small warm pressure against my side. She smelled like the perfume I had once chosen for her birthday.

“Are you all right, baby?”

I said nothing.

“She did this,” Alexis said softly. “She lit the curtain. I saw her do it. She looked right at me and lit it. Then she ran!”

I had asked the firemen. They had said the source was a candle on the vanity. The fire department’s report would take a week.

I pressed my thumb into the bridge of my nose.

“I want to see her.”

“Who, darling?”

“Sabrina.”

Alexis’s hand on my arm went still. Half a second. Then she smiled up at me.

“You want to see her? Baby, she tried to kill your grandma!”

“I want to ask her some questions,” I said plainly.

“What questions?” she laughed. “She lit the curtain, and then she ran. I’ve already told you everything that happened.”

Something pulled tight in me, and I set my jaw and shoved it down hard, before it could turn into anything I would have to feel.

No. That woman didn’t exist. That woman set a curtain on fire and ran. I was not going to be made a fool of twice in one night.

I stood up so fast the chair scraped.

“I’m going to go check on Sabrina,” I said. “Someone should. The police will want a statement.”

Alexis made a small noise that wasn’t quite a word.

“Don’t go alone, Nate—” She ran after me.

“Stay here, Alexis,” I told her firmly.

The nurse at the station looked up. She had a kind, exhausted face.

“Mrs. Cooper’s room?” I asked.

“Two-eleven, sir, but—”

“Thank you.”

The room was on the third floor. The door stood open, but to my astonishment, the bed had been stripped. A folded gown lay on the chair and the closet was empty.

I caught the sleeve of a passing nurse. “Smoke inhalation, came in last night. Where did you move her?”

The nurse checked her tablet, frowning. “Cooper? She wasn’t moved. She was discharged.”

“Discharged.” I heard my own voice go flat. “She can’t be discharged! She is my wife! Who would—who discharged her?”

The nurse glanced at her screen. I could see her trying to figure out whether to give me the name.

I waited.

“Eric Atwood,” she said finally. “Mr. Eric Atwood signed her out.”

I stopped breathing for a beat.

The room went very small. I felt Alexis go still beside me. I did not look at her. I looked at the empty bed.

Eric Atwood.

I knew that name. I had been hearing that name for three years, dropped into a hundred phone calls and a hundred dinners. My brother Eric. Eric would never. Eric’s going to be furious.

Alexis’s brother.

Alexis’s brother had walked into this hospital and signed my wife out the door.

For one beat I tried to make it mean something, tried to fit two pieces that wouldn’t fit. And then the question burned off in something hotter and simpler.

My wife.

Sabrina had been in that bed an hour ago, bandaged and unconscious, alone. Another man had come in and walked her out.

Another man’s name on her paperwork.

Another man’s car taking her somewhere.

Another man’s hand on the small of her back.

Something moved in my chest that I did not have a name for. My hands closed slowly at my sides.

“Sir?” The nurse was still there. “Do you want the discharge paperwork?”

“No,” I said.

I stood in the empty doorway and stared at the stripped bed and the soot in my palms, and my blood went loud in my ears.

I walked past the waiting room without stopping.

I did not tell Alexis what the nurse had said. I didn’t ask myself why. Some instinct closed my mouth around it.

I walked past her into the corridor. I did not say goodbye to my grandmother. I took the elevator down and got into my car and sat there for a long time with my hands on the wheel.

My wife was somewhere with another man.

My wife!