Chapter 28 Who Do You Trust

By the time I had said "Of course," Delphine was already sitting down.

She took the chair across from my desk, the one residents used when they came to be told something, and she arranged herself in it: knees together, ankles crossed, the gloves folded once and laid in her lap.

The lilacs she set on my desk on top of the redo patient's printed scans. Water from the stems soaked slowly into a CT slice of his chest.

"I won't keep you," she said. "I know you have a patient. I asked at the desk. Such a nice girl. She said you were between."

"I have thirty-five minutes."

"Then I'll take ten." She smiled. Up close her face was smooth and well looked after, the skin around her eyes only slightly creased.

Her eyes were a pale, washed blue, and they rested on me with great warmth and moved over everything in the room: the filing cabinets, the corkboard, the shark eating a hospital, Felix's heart with its wrong-way arrow. "Those are theirs? How lovely. The little ones draw?"

"They draw."

"Rhys used to draw ships. Did you know that? Endlessly. Every margin of every schoolbook." She let that sit. "Margot, I'm going to be frank with you, because I think you're a woman who prefers it."

I waited.

"Edmund is fragile. You know that better than any of us. You've seen his heart, you've seen his chart, you're the one who woke him up." A small graceful movement of one hand, acknowledging it.

"And Rhys is raw. You saw him this morning, I expect. Everyone did. He's had his life turned over in a month. Children he didn't know about. His grandfather speaking again. Old business in the papers. He's not sleeping. I'm his stepmother, I notice these things." She leaned forward a little. "Sweetheart has had a hard week. Let's not give him a harder month."

"What are you asking me, Mrs. Calloway?"

"Delphine. Please." She sat back. "I'm not asking. I'm offering. There's a difference, and I want you to hear it."

She named it like the price of a used car she didn't much care whether she sold.

"Five million dollars. Wired wherever you like, in whatever name you like. A clinic of your own in Geneva. I know people on the board of an excellent private hospital there, and they would be thrilled to have the woman who invented the Fairley repair.

"A small non-disclosure, nothing that would embarrass you, simply an agreement that the family's private matters stay private. And you and the little ones settled and gone by June. Before the summer. Before things become," she searched for the word, "louder."

The room smelled overwhelmingly of lilac. Outside, a gull landed on my windowsill, looked in, and left.

I wanted to stand up. I didn't. I laid my palms on the desk, on either side of the wet scans, and when I spoke I made my voice lower than hers, so that she had to tilt her head to hear it.

"Interesting," I said. "You priced me at the same figure as a mid-size MRI suite."

Delphine's smile did not change at all.

"I priced you," she said, "at what I thought you'd find respectful. If I've misjudged that, tell me the number."

"There isn't a number."

"There's always a number, my dear. It's only a question of whether you say it now or later, to a lawyer, in a much worse mood." She rose, as easily as she had sat. She drew on one glove. "Think about it. You don't need to say anything today. I'll have something sent over so it's all in writing and nobody can say I was unclear."

"Leave the flowers," I said. "Edmund's room could use them."

For the first time something moved behind her eyes. It was gone almost before I saw it.

"Of course," she said. "They're from his garden. He always loved the lilacs."

She went out. I listened to her heels down the corridor, unhurried, all the way to the elevator.

I sat for a moment with my palms still flat on the desk. Less than an hour after Rhys had stood at his own podium and said *I'm not engaged to anyone*, his stepmother had walked into my office with an armful of Edmund's lilacs and a price. I didn't believe in coincidences of that size. I had never been able to afford them.

Then I picked up the redo patient's scans by one dry corner, shook the water off them, and went to scrub.

---

The letter came on Friday morning by courier, on thick cream paper with a Boston firm's name engraved across the top. I didn't open it. I took it to Tamsin's office at eight, on my way in, and laid it on her desk beside her coffee and an everything bagel with far too much cream cheese.

She read it standing up, chewing, her eyes going left to right fast.

"'In recognition of the emotional burden.'" She snorted. "'A consideration of five million dollars.' 'Relocation to a mutually agreeable jurisdiction outside the Commonwealth.' 'Mutual non-disparagement.'" She turned the page. "Oh, here's my favorite. 'Dr. Fairley shall make no further unsupervised contact with Mr. Edmund Calloway, in light of the sensitivity of past events.'"

She took a large bite of bagel. Then she put the bagel down, pinched the letter by its top corners, and tore it cleanly in half from top to bottom.

"Absolutely not," she said, through cream cheese.

"I know."

"I know you know. I needed to do it with my hands." She held out the two halves. "Do you want me to send a reply? I can send a reply that will make a partner at that firm call in sick."

"No." I took the halves from her and folded them together and put them in my bag. "I'm going to keep it."

"For what?"

"For the file."

Tamsin stopped chewing. "You have a file."

"I have the beginning of one." I touched the torn halves in my bag. "She came to my office in person. She brought flowers from Edmund's garden. Then she had a Boston firm put it on paper, with a clause keeping me away from him." I looked at Tamsin. "She wants me out of his room more than she wants me out of the country."

Tamsin put her coffee down without drinking it.

"Write that down," she said. "Date it. Make the file thick."

---

Edmund's speech sessions were at ten in a small therapy room on the cardiac floor, at the far end from the nurses' station. It had a window, a round table, a whiteboard, and a laminated poster of the mouth in cross-section that I had never seen anyone look at. Yvette Moreau ran them three mornings a week.

I came when my schedule let me, because I liked to see his rhythm on the monitor while he worked. Speech was hard labor for him. His heart rate climbed with every word.

Before the session I passed his room. Someone on the night shift had found a vase for the lilacs and put them on the windowsill.

The bed was empty; the aide had already wheeled him down. But his pillow had been turned to the far side, away from the window, and the reading glasses he never used had been left on the sill in front of the vase, folded, a small barricade.

I moved the vase to the nurses' station on my way past. The charge nurse said they were gorgeous. I said they were.

Rhys was already there when I came in.

He was in a chair against the wall by the window, in a dark suit, with his arms folded across his chest. He had been there some time; the coffee cup on the sill beside him was empty. His eyes came to me once when I entered, then went back to his grandfather.

"Dr. Calloway asked to sit in," Yvette said to me, and then caught herself with a little laugh. "Mr. Calloway. Sorry. He's the proxy. He's entitled."

"Of course."

I took the other chair, at the end of the table, where I could see the portable monitor clipped to Edmund's wheelchair. Rate ninety-two. Regular.

Edmund sat at the table in a cardigan somebody had buttoned wrong. His left hand rested on a set of picture cards. His right lay on the blanket over his knees, curled and heavy. When I sat, his eyes came to me and stayed, and the good side of his mouth lifted.

Yvette worked him for twenty minutes. Names of objects first: cup, key, boat. He got "cup" in one try and "boat" in three.

Then sung phrases, which came more easily, because singing used a different road through the brain. She hummed the first line of "Happy Birthday" and he finished it in a cracked tuneful baritone that made the nurse passing the door glance in and grin. Then short questions, yes and no, then questions that needed a word.

His rate went to a hundred and four. A fine sweat came out on his forehead. Yvette wiped it with a tissue without breaking off.

I watched Rhys out of the side of my eye. He hadn't moved. His arms were still folded. But his right thumb had found the base of his left ring finger and was tapping there, once, twice, against the bare skin where nothing was, a small steady stubborn rhythm I had watched across a breakfast table for three years. He had never noticed he was doing it.

"Edmund," Yvette said. She put the cards aside and folded her hands on the table and met his eyes. "One more, and then we'll stop. This is a big one. You don't have to get it. Who do you trust?" She waited. "Who do you trust with your heart?"

Edmund's mouth opened.

Nothing came.

He closed it. He breathed through his nose. His left hand pressed down flat on the table, the knuckles going pale. His mouth opened again and made a shape, a soft *hh*, and stopped. His jaw moved. His eyes went to Yvette, then the window, then the ceiling, hunting for something he had put down in a room he knew perfectly well.

The monitor said a hundred and twelve.

"Take your time," Yvette said.

He took his time. He fought for it. I could see the fight in his neck, in the cords standing out above the badly buttoned cardigan, in his whole left side leaning into the table.

He made the *hh* sound again. He made a sound like the beginning of a word and lost it, and his face crumpled for a second, then smoothed out again, and he went back in.

I checked the clock on the wall above the whiteboard, because I am a surgeon and I can't not. One minute. A minute and a half.

Against the wall, Rhys had unfolded his arms. He was sitting forward now, elbows on his knees, his hands loose between them, and every muscle in his face was holding still so that nothing would show. The tapping hadn't stopped. It was faster now.

Two minutes.

Edmund's left hand lifted from the table.

It shook. The whole arm shook, from the shoulder down. He raised it to the height of his chin, and then the index finger came out from the others, wavering, and found a direction, and held it.

It was pointing at me.

"Her," Edmund said. The word came out rough and whole. He breathed. The finger didn't drop. He gathered himself, and for a second all of him went into his face, and his eyes were absolutely clear.

"True."