Chapter 35 Under His Shirt

"My mother told it," I said. "Half of Old Harbor tells it. The fish market tells it to tourists."

I said it without breaking stride, in the voice I'd have used on a resident asking where the gauze was kept. I drew my sleeve out of his fingers, not roughly, knelt, and held out Felix's left rain boot, and Felix stepped into it.

Every word was true. Helen had told that joke at every bedside she ever sat beside. Mabel Ortega told it across the crushed ice at her fish stall, a lobster in each fist, to anyone who stood still long enough, and the man who sold chowder by the ferry dock had it painted on a board above his window with the punch line in red. I had told it at thirteen, in the dark, to a boy whose face I couldn't see properly. And I had told it to my children every time either of them was frightened, from before they could understand a word of it, because it was the one thing I owned that still had Helen's voice in it.

I held out the right boot. Felix stepped into that one too.

Above me Rhys hadn't moved. I could feel him standing among the cubbies looking down at the top of my head, and I knew what he was doing, because I had watched him do it across a hundred negotiating tables: deciding whether to believe me, weighing what I'd said against some figure only he could see and running the numbers a second time to be sure.

"The fish market," he said.

"Mabel Ortega's stall. Ask her. She'll tell it to you and charge you for the privilege."

I stood with Felix's jacket and zipped him into it. Pippa came barreling down the corridor with goldfish crackers in both fists and Admiral in a headlock, announcing that the Portuguese girls didn't believe in sharks, which was frankly their problem, and the moment broke up into ordinary pieces, coats and backpacks and goodbyes shouted over heads.

When I looked up from the zipper Rhys was walking away toward the doors with his coat hanging open and his phone already at his ear. He never looked back, and whoever he was calling, I doubted it was his office.

---

That night at Whitlock Hall the twins had the big bed in the blue room, the one with four posts and a canopy that Pippa had christened the boat. Felix lay on the wall side with the sheet up to his chin and his stethoscope round his neck. Pippa lay crosswise, which was how she slept in every bed she had ever been put in, with Admiral on her stomach and my yellow blanket over her feet.

I sat on the edge of the mattress and read them the shark book for the fourth time that week, doing the hammerhead in the gravelly voice Pippa insisted on, and when I closed it she was nowhere near asleep.

"Did Grumpy not like my joke?"

"He liked it."

"He didn't laugh. Everybody laughed. Arlo fell *over.*"

"Sometimes a joke surprises a person so much they forget to laugh."

She examined that from her pillow and decided it was suspicious. "That's weird."

"It's a bit weird."

Felix turned his head on the pillow and whispered to his sister, a short one. Pippa listened and then hoisted herself onto her elbows to deliver it, because Felix's news was always hers to hand out.

"Felix says he went the color of the paper fish."

I smoothed the sheet over Felix's chest. Under my palm his heart went quick and light, with the small extra swish of the murmur beneath it that I could have found in the dark with gloves on.

"Felix notices everything," I said.

"Grandma Helen's jokes are the best jokes." Pippa flopped back down. "Even the bad ones. *Especially* the bad ones. She'd be happy I did it."

"She'd be thrilled."

"Was she at school when *you* did it?"

"I never did it at school."

"Where did you do it, then?"

I reached over and turned off the lamp.

"Lots of places," I said, into the dark. "Go to sleep. Lord Tuesday gets up early, and he'll want to inspect you."

---

At seven-fifteen on Thursday morning Rosa Ibarra came into my office without knocking, which was normal, and shut the door behind her, which was not.

She put a printout down on my desk on top of my coffee and stood over it with her arms folded.

"Ruby Galbraith's implant order."

I picked it up. It was the electronic order form, the one Kemp had offered to put through for me, with my measurements at the top exactly as I had sent them. Below, on the order line, the ring was listed as a twenty-two. I read it a second time, slowly, and it still said twenty-two.

"I sent twenty-six."

"I know you sent twenty-six. I was copied. I've got it in my inbox." Rosa leaned in and put one short, unpainted fingernail on a line near the foot of the page. "Read the history."

The form kept a revision log. Original order Wednesday, 11:42 a.m., under Kemp's login: twenty-six millimeters. Revised Thursday, 2:14 a.m., under Kemp's login, ring size changed from twenty-six to twenty-two, and in the comment field three words.

*Per echo re-read.*

"Two-fourteen in the morning," said Rosa. "Who re-reads a pediatric echo at two-fourteen in the morning?"

"Someone who's worried about it."

"Someone who's worried about it calls you. No call, no email, no page. He changed a number and went back to bed."

I pulled Ruby's study up on my screen while she watched, because I didn't trust my memory with a thing like this and didn't want her to have to trust it either. I found the long-axis view, the mitral annulus laid flat across the screen in gray, and set the calipers on it myself, edge to edge, three times in three separate frames.

Twenty-six. Twenty-five point eight. Twenty-six point one.

Then I opened the echo lab's record. The study had been read exactly once, three weeks ago, by the pediatric cardiologist who referred her, and nobody had added so much as a line to it since. I sat back in my chair.

Rosa's face, which in theater gave away nothing at all, gave away nothing now either, and I had stood across a table from her long enough to know what that meant.

What I had was a printout with my numbers on it, a revision log under a chief's login, and a comment pointing to a re-read that didn't exist. That was the whole of it. I had no reason a man would do such a thing that I could say out loud, and I could not walk into Okafor's office and accuse the head of cardiothoracic surgery of trying to hurt a nine-year-old on the strength of three words in a comment field. Kemp would say I'd misread the scan. He'd say twenty-two against twenty-six was a matter of judgment at two in the morning, and that I was the woman from the column, the poisoner ex, seeing plots everywhere because one had been hung round my own neck.

He might well win, too. And if I was wrong, if there was a re-read somewhere in a system I couldn't open, then I would have accused a colleague of something monstrous in front of the whole sixth floor and been wrong about it. I knew what that cost; I had been paying it for five years.

"Rosa. On Monday I want a full set of sizers on my back table. Every size, twenty to thirty-two, pediatric and adult."

"You're not changing the order back?"

"If I change it back, he knows I saw it." I looked at the comment field again. "I want to see what comes out of that box."

Rosa didn't argue. She took the printout off my desk, folded it twice, and slid it into the breast pocket of her scrub top.

"I'll bring the sizers," she said. "And I'll count them twice."

---

At noon I went down to the hospital café for soup, because I hadn't eaten since six and Rosa had told me in the hallway that I looked like a chart nobody had signed.

Vivienne Sutter was sitting in the corner booth.

She had on enormous dark glasses indoors and a cream trench coat, and her honey-blond hair was tucked under a silk scarf in a way designed to say *please don't recognize me* and guaranteed to make the whole room recognize her. Three medical students at the next table were filming her while pretending to check their phones. An untouched coffee sat in front of her, and beside it on the tabletop lay her left hand, arranged so that the ring from the photograph caught the light.

She raised that hand when she saw me and crooked a finger.

I nearly walked out, but I bought my soup, paid for it, carried it over and sat down across from her, because I had learned in Zurich, in the worst year of my life, that the quickest way to end a conversation is to sit all the way through it.

"Darling," said Vivienne. "You look exhausted."

"I'm a surgeon."

"Mm." She took off the glasses and folded them. Her eyes were blue and heavily made up and bright. "I won't keep you. I only wanted you to hear this from me before you heard it somewhere else. I think that's fair. Woman to woman."

I took the lid off my soup.

"Rhys came to see me last night. At my hotel. Late." She let that settle on the table between us. "He'd had a strange day, he said. Something at your children's school." The smile came. "A joke."

I picked up my spoon.

"He asked me about Gull Point. About that night. He's hardly asked me about it in sixteen years, he always said he couldn't bear to make me relive it." She turned the ring a quarter-turn on her finger. "And he said, 'The joke you told me, at the car. Was it the lobster one?' And I said—" a small breathy laugh, perfectly pitched, "I said, 'Yes, darling. Of course it was. Of course it was the lobster one.'"

I ate a spoonful of soup. It was tomato, and far too hot, and I ate another.

I thought of ice. I thought of a car on its roof in the dark at the bend above the lookout, its wheels still turning slowly in the air, and my mother up on the road shouting into the call box, and the window at my knees with no glass left in it. A boy hanging upside down in his seat belt, his face black with blood in the beam of my mother's flashlight, telling me he was cold. And a girl of thirteen kneeling in the slush with her mittens soaked through, saying the only thing she could think of to keep him talking, saying it and saying it again until she had said it eleven times. I had counted.

Vivienne was watching my face with close attention, waiting for the jealous ex-wife, since it was the only part she could picture me playing.

"He looked so relieved, darling," she said. "Like I'd handed him his own heart back."

I put down my spoon.

"Interesting," I said.

I said it pleasantly. Then I picked the spoon up again and went on with my soup.

Vivienne's smile held, but behind it the look curdled into puzzlement, an actress who has delivered her best line to a house that has gone home. She had come for tears, or a scene, or at the least a flinch, and she was getting tomato soup. She sat back and watched me eat and turned her ring again.

I finished, put the lid back on the cup, and stood with my tray.

"Thank you for telling me," I said. "Woman to woman."

Vivienne rose too, taking her time over the coat and the bag and the glasses, and slid out of the booth so that for a moment we stood close enough for me to catch her perfume, expensive and green, cut grass in a bank vault. She leaned in as though to kiss my cheek.

"Ask him," she said, very softly, into my ear, "what he wears under his shirt."