I'm not stepping back this time. Whatever this man is, whatever he does next, we face it together. You don't get to disappear on me to keep me safe. I won't let you do to me what I did to you. For a long moment, she did not move.
And then the fight went out of her shoulders and she sank back down into the chair, her coat still hanging off one arm, and she let herself be talked into staying not because the danger had lessened, but because someone had finally chosen her out loud and meant it. All right. She said, barely audible. All right, together. Denise, watching from across the room, pressed her hand to her mouth and turned away toward the window, and this time the thing on her face was not only guilt, it was something closer to hope, the sight of the man she had once dismissed becoming in front of her exactly the kind of man she had been too blind to see.
The peace lasted perhaps a minute. The phone on the bedside table rang the hospital's own line, the heavy beige handset that patients almost never used. The sound was so unexpected that all three of them startled. Henry reached for it. Hello?
Nothing. Not silence exactly. He could hear breathing slow and deliberate and the faint sound of wind of an open space. He could hear a car door somewhere far off. "Who is this? " Henry said.
The line went dead. Before he could lower the handset, Lia's cell phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She drew it out with the unhurried dread of someone who already knew. She looked at the screen and her whole body went rigid. "It's him. " she whispered.
"Don't open it. " Henry said. Alvarez said. But she had already opened it because she could not not look. And what she saw drained the last of the strength from her. She turned the phone so that Henry could see.
It was a photograph. A photograph of the hospital taken from below the gray face of the building, the rows of windows. And in the center of the frame circled in a crude red ring drawn over the image was a single window. Their window. The one beside Henry's bed with the gray curtain pulled half across it.