All Chapters of His Only Soft Spot: Chapter 1 - Chapter 4

The TermsLena's POVThe charge nurse on the pediatric floor caught me at the nurses' station the next evening, with an odd look on her face."Lena. There's a man in the family lounge asking for you." She lowered her voice. "He's been there forty minutes. He hasn't asked for coffee. He hasn't looked at his phone. He told security he's 'waiting for a nurse' and security let him stay, which has never happened in the history of this hospital."I didn't need to ask. I put down my chart and walked down the hall.The family lounge was a cheerful, ridiculous room, with dinosaur tiles on the floor, a bookshelf of battered picture books and a cartoon giraffe painted on the wall. The man sitting on the small blue sofa looked like a mistake someone had made in a painting. He wore a dark overcoat. His hands were resting on his knees, completely still.He stood when I came in. He was tall, six-two at least and lean the way a blade is lean. His hair was short and black. His eyes were gray, flat and

The LaundromatLena's POVFor four days, Adrian Volkov kept every single term.The driver turned out to be a gray-haired man named Pavel, who drove a gray Camry, listened to opera at a volume just barely audible and said exactly four words to me each morning.."Good morning, Miss Harper." He never came inside the hospital. He never parked within sight of my building. Once, when I walked out of the staff garage in the pouring rain, he was standing beside my car with an umbrella and he stepped back the moment I took it, as if the umbrella had been the whole job.Dmitri moved out of the ICU into a step-down room under a different name. He asked me every shift whether the door was locked and every shift I checked it in front of him. His fever was gone. His color was coming back. In the evenings, Viktor came and sat in a plastic chair outside his room with a crossword puzzle, solving it in pen and swearing softly at the clues.It was almost easy to forget what I'd signed up for.Then, on F