Miriam looked at him. She thought about the promise, still warm in her chest like a held coal. She thought about what Eli would do with the truth right now — ride out tonight with every angry man he owned, straight into whatever Deke had waiting. Jessie had been right. He would burn the world down, and the world would burn back.
She asked for the old woman, Miriam said gently. "That's me, I guess. Then she slept."
It was true. It was not the truth. Miriam had lied by omission to commanding officers and to her husband and to herself, and she had never once enjoyed it, and she did not enjoy it now. But a promise was a weight you chose to carry, and she had chosen.
Eli pushed off the wall and gripped her shoulder — carefully, like a man handling something breakable. "Thank you," he said, "for being here when I can't be."
Go on in, Miriam said. "She knows you're coming. They always know."
She watched him disappear into room six, then stood at the fountain a while longer, feeling the secret settle deeper into her bones, heavier and hotter.
She drove home in the dark. The highway was empty, the stars out in their cold thousands, the F-150's headlights cutting a thin yellow wedge through the black. She parked in front of the cinder-block house, where Jace and Preach sat up straight on the porch at the sound of her engine, and waved them back down.
She did not go inside. She sat in the truck with the engine off and the windows down, listening to the desert breathe, and held the secret Jessie had given her like a hot coal in both hands.
A planned hit on the charity run. At the canyon. Men waiting.
And Eli Thornton, who loved that girl enough to fill a woman's driveway with eight hundred engines, must not know. Not yet.
Miriam stared at the stars until her neck ached. Somewhere out there, Deke Slade was planning a massacre. Somewhere behind her, two young men kept an earnest, useless watch. And in a hospital bed in Ely, a twenty-nine-year-old woman slept the sleep of someone who had handed her burden to the only person in the world she trusted to carry it.
Well, Miriam said to the dark, to Amos, to no one. "I wanted company. Be careful what you wish for, old woman."
She sat in the hospital parking lot of her own driveway until midnight, and then she went inside and cleaned the Ithaca 37, oiled it, loaded it, and set it by the bed where she could reach it in the dark.
Miriam started keeping the night watch on the fifth night.
It wasn't planned. She had driven home at dusk after another day in the chair beside Jessie's bed, eaten half a bowl of reheated stew while Jace and Preach argued cheerfully on her porch about the correct way to grill a steak, and gone to bed at nine. At eleven she was still awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to Barnaby snore at the foot of the bed and thinking about a girl who had handed her a secret like a hot coal and then gone back to sleep.
By midnight she was dressed. By half past, she was on Highway 50 with the F-150's heater rattling and her knitting bag on the passenger seat.
The night nurse waved her through with a look that said she had seen stranger devotions. The club's night guard, a broad patched member called Hammer, was dozing upright in the waiting area with his boots on the chair opposite. He startled when Miriam came in, then grinned sheepishly.
Couldn't sleep either, huh? he whispered.
Old bones, Miriam said, settling into the chair nearest Jessie's door with her knitting. "You snore, I'll wake you."
She knitted, the afghan growing by inches — rust red, sand gold, sage green. The hospital hummed its night song: ventilators, distant pages, the soft squeak of rubber soles on linoleum. At 1:40 she got up, used the restroom, bought a cup of terrible coffee from the machine, and came back. Hammer had relocated to the hallway bench with a magazine. Everything was as it should be.
At 2:07, the elevator dinged.
Miriam looked up out of habit. A man stepped out wearing surgical scrubs, a cap, and a mask pulled down under his chin. He carried a clipboard. He walked like he belonged — unhurried, purposeful — straight toward room six.
Miriam's hands went still on the knitting.
It was the shoes. In Da Nang she had learned to read people from the ground up, because the ground was where the blood pooled. Hospital staff wore soft-soled clogs or quiet sneakers, broken in, silent. This man wore work boots — laced high, heavy tread, the kind that left prints. They squeaked faintly on the linoleum with every step, and he walked as if the sound annoyed him, as if he wasn't used to being heard.
Then the badge. It hung from a lanyard clipped to his scrub pocket, and as he passed under the hallway light, Miriam caught the photo. The photo showed a younger man with a full head of hair. The man walking past her was balding, with a scar through his left eyebrow. And the lanyard — day staff wore blue. Night staff wore green. His was red. Miriam had been coming here long enough to know that.
She stood up. Her hip protested. She ignored it.
Excuse me, she said.
The man stopped three steps from Jessie's door. He turned. His eyes were flat and tired and wrong — the eyes of a man doing a job, not a man doing rounds.
Yes? he said.
Which service are you with? Miriam asked. "Dr. Patel's team already did vitals at midnight. I was here."
A beat. Too long a beat. "I'm with — night float. Covering." He reached for the door handle of room six.
What's the patient's name? Miriam said.
Another beat. "The chart —"
Wrong answer. Miriam's voice cut through the hallway like a slap. "Her name is Jessie. And you don't know it, because you've never laid eyes on her, and that badge isn't yours."