Chapter eight: The Visitor Log

Caelum

At three in the morning, I was still holding a dead man's signature.

I had read the receipt so many times that the loops of Edmund Pryce's name had begun to look like rope. I sat in my office at Mercy General with one lamp on, the page flat under my palm, and tried to build a version of events in which I was not a fool.

I couldn't.

*Backdated,* I had told Wynn. *It happens.* But I had grown up in that council office, doing homework under Pryce's desk while he stamped ledgers, and I knew his habits better than I knew my father's. Pryce never signed anything early. He used to say a signature was a promise, and promises were kept in order. He had also once slipped me a lemon drop during a four-hour budget hearing and told me not to tell the Alpha. I have been nine. It was the first secret anyone ever trusted me with.

The hospital was quiet around me. Down the hall, past forty rooms I had emptied for a woman who would not look at me, one window was still lit. Room 12. I had walked past it twice tonight without stopping, the way a man walks past a bar he is trying to quit.

Ms. Vale had left the floor around midnight, her coat buttoned wrong, her face was drained. I had watched her on the corridor camera and told myself it was a security matter. When she came back, she had stopped at Pip's door and pressed her forehead against the glass, and my heart skipped a bit.

I turned off the lamp, took my keys, and drove.

The road to the hospice was dark and empty, and I took it faster than I should have. Somewhere past the second crossroads I realized I was gripping the wheel hard enough to hurt, and that I had not once turned on the radio. I had spent five years filling every silence. Tonight I wanted to hear exactly what it said.

St. Brendan's County Hospice was at the end of a gravel road forty minutes from Ironwood, a low brick building with a porch light and a wind chime that never stopped. I had not worn a suit. I had not brought Wynn. I wanted to walk in as nobody, because nobody was who people told the truth to.

The night nurse was a broad woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a beaded chain and the tired, level eyes of someone who had watched a great many people leave. Her badge said ODALYS.

"Visiting hours are over, hon."

"I know." I set the receipt on the desk, folded so that only the signature showed. "I'm trying to find out about a patient who died here. Edmund Pryce."

She did not touch the page. She looked at me for a long moment, then at the page, and some of the tiredness went out of her face.

"Pryce," she said. "Lord. That was years ago."

"You remember him?"

"You remember the ones who don't get visitors." She took off her glasses and let them hang. "He came to us in the summer, after a stroke. Left side gone, right hand curled up like a claw. Couldn't lift a spoon, let alone a pen. Sweet old man. Spent most of his days staring at the window and muttering about ledgers."

My mouth had gone dry. "He couldn't sign his name?"

"Honey, he couldn't scratch his own nose." She frowned. "Why?"

I turned the receipt around and slid it toward her. She read it, and her mouth thinned.

"That's a nice signature," she said quietly. "Whoever wrote that had a steady hand."

*Whoever wrote that.* The words settled over me like cold water. I had spent five years hating a girl for taking money that a paralyzed man had supposedly handed her.

"Did he have visitors?" I asked. "Anyone at all?"

"One or two." She hesitated, then pushed back her chair. "We keep the logs. Hospice rules. Hang on."

She disappeared into the back office. I stood in the lobby with the wind chime ringing outside and a clock ticking on the wall, and I did something I had not done in years. I let myself picture Sable's face the night she left. Not the version I had edited into something easy to hate, but the real one, the desperate one, while holding a duffel bag in both arms.

I could not remember whether she had looked at me.

I had not been there. I had been upstairs, signing a contract with my father's lawyers, believing the story that had been handed to me because it was easier than asking a question which at this point was what I regretted doing.

Odalys came back carrying a gray archive box, its lid soft with age. She set it on the desk and lifted out a thick visitor ledger, its spine cracked.

"Summer through fall," she said, opening to a marked page. "Five years ago. I remember because we had a bad flu going around and I was short-staffed." She paused, her thumb resting on the margin. "And because of the car. A black sedan, engine running, parked out front for the whole visit. The driver never got out. Never even turned off the lights, so it was easier to be noticed."

A black car with its headlights off, idling at a gate. I had a calm look on my face trying to hide the panic underneath.

"It was a quiet month for him," Odalys went on. "Two names, that's all."

She turned the book toward me.

The first entry was a woman from a church group, a name I did not know, dated in July. A single visit. A donation of wool socks.

The second entry sat lower on the page, written in a hand I had seen a thousand times.

My breath stopped.

It was dated August, the week before Pryce died. The time of arrival was late, almost midnight. There was a line for *relationship to patient,* and in that line, a single word: *Family.*

Above it, the signature. A tall, looping capital, extravagant and careful, the kind of flourish a girl develops when she has been taught that a name is a kind of armor. I had seen that capital on a hundred place cards at a hundred pack dinners. I had seen it on a mating contract where my father slid across a desk.

I had seen it in the margin of a receipt for fifty thousand dollars, five years ago, in Odessa's hand, as she held it between two fingers on the por

ch steps.

Below the flourish, in the same ink, the rest of the name.

Lane.