“Apex University Hospital.”
Longer pause.
“Cath,” he said carefully, “I thought you were coming in Friday.”
“I changed plans.”
Another silence. I could almost hear the speed of his thoughts.
“That’s great,” he said finally, too bright. “I’m just in something rather critical. Why don’t you head home, rest, shower, and I’ll meet you for dinner? I’ve got good updates.”
“If you are not in the lobby in three minutes,” I said, “I will call Arthur and ask him to bring me the audit notes on the missing two million dollars from the MRI procurement account.”
The change in his breathing was audible.
Tiffany stared at me. “What are you doing?” she whispered. “Why are you acting like that?”
Mark’s voice returned, stripped now of all performance. “Catherine.”
“Three minutes.”
“Don’t do this in public.”
“Then perhaps you should have avoided doing it in private.”
The line went dead.
I lowered the phone.
The crowd had thickened. Not dramatically, just enough that the air changed. Word travels in hospitals like blood through tissue—swift, directional, silent until suddenly the whole body seems to know. Two transport aides lingered near the entrance to radiology. A pair of residents in white coats stood a few feet away pretending not to stare and failing. Someone in environmental services had stopped mopping and was now holding the handle like a rifle.
Tiffany’s face had lost color beneath the bronzer. “What did you just say to him?”
I met her eyes. “I’d suggest you keep that stream running. Since you wanted an audience.”
At that moment David reappeared from the elevators. He had stripped off one pair of gloves but still wore the other. There was dried sweat on his hairline and the fixed, dangerous calm of a man who has just saved a life and is therefore less than usually tolerant of nonsense. He took in my blazer, Tiffany’s phone, Henry’s face, the general geometry of impending collapse, and came toward us.
“Catherine,” he said quietly when he reached me. “Are you hurt?”
“Only aesthetically.”
His eyes moved to Tiffany. “What happened?”
“She assaulted me,” Tiffany said immediately, voice rising in renewed performance. “This psycho pushed my coffee all over both of us and now she’s trying to blackmail my husband.”
David looked from Tiffany to me and back again. He is not a man given to expressive eyebrows, but one went up.
“Your husband,” he said. “Interesting.”
