Chương 3
I had believed him.
I had even thanked him.
“Maybe,” I said.
His hand settled briefly on my shoulder.
The gesture used to comfort me.
Now I had to resist pulling away.
“Get some sleep,” he said.
“I’ll call you.”
He packed his bag.
At the door, he stopped.
“One other thing.”
“Yes?”
“Has someone been talking to you about experimental treatments?”
The question was casual enough to have been rehearsed.
“No.”
“Good.”
The door closed behind him.
I counted his footsteps down the hall until they disappeared.
Then I remained motionless for another thirty seconds.
“Hannah.”
The connecting door to the dressing room opened.
She had been waiting there for twenty minutes.
“I heard.”
“Call your specialist.”
“I already did.”
I turned toward her voice.
“When?”
“Last night.”
Despite everything, irritation flashed through me.
“I told you to find a name.”
“You were going to ask.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You made me hide in a dressing room during your medical appointment.”
She had me there.
“When can they see me?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“That quickly?”
“I didn’t use your name.”
That surprised me.
“What did you say?”
“That I had a patient with traumatic bilateral vision loss, no follow-up retinal imaging in five years, and preserved pupillary response.”
“You lied about having a patient.”
“I said I knew one.”
“You just said patient.”
“I was nervous.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Then Hannah added, “There’s a problem.”
“Of course there is.”
“The specialist wants your original hospital records.”
Those records were stored in the Mercer family office.
Daniel Cross controlled access to the archive.
For the first time since Lucy had switched on that flashlight, fear arrived cleanly enough for me to recognize it.
Not fear that Hannah was wrong.
Fear that she might be right.
“Don’t request them,” I said.
“Then what do we do?”
I picked up the bottle Hale had left beside my coffee.
“We find out what happens when the blind man stops behaving exactly the way everyone expects.”
The first thing I did was put the bottle in my pocket.
Hannah heard the glass tap against my belt buckle.
“You’re keeping it?”
“I’m keeping evidence.”
“You don’t know that it is evidence.”
“No.”
I stood and reached for my cane.
“That’s why I’m not throwing it away.”
Hannah did not answer, but I could hear her moving around the room with the tight, economical steps she used when she was worried.
“What time tomorrow?”
“Nine fifteen.”
“Where?”
“White Plains.”
“Name.”
“Dr. Elise Navarro.”
I waited.
“What?”
“You normally have an opinion about everyone within ten seconds.”
“I researched her.”
“And?”
“She teaches part-time at Columbia, specializes in traumatic retinal injury, and has no obvious connection to Hale.”
“Obvious?”
“I checked hospital boards, charity events, professional associations, published papers, LinkedIn, and three years of conference programs.”
“That sounds obsessive.”
“I work for you.”
“Fair.”
I walked toward the bedroom door.
Hannah moved beside me but did not touch my arm.
“Cross will know if you leave.”
“He always knows when I leave.”
“You said not to involve him.”
“I said not to tell him why.”
Daniel Cross had spent fifteen years making himself indispensable to my family.
He had started as a dock supervisor when my father still ran Mercer Shipping out of two grimy offices in Red Hook.
By the time I inherited the company, Cross knew every pier manager, union delegate, customs broker, city inspector, and private security contractor worth knowing between Newark and New London.
After the explosion, he became more than an employee.
He became my hands.
That had been useful when I could not sign my name without touching the edge of the paper first.
It had also become dangerous in ways I had never bothered to examine.
I found him downstairs in the breakfast room forty minutes later.
I knew he was there because he drank coffee like a man personally offended by silence.
The spoon hit porcelain twice.
Then again.
“Boss.”
He still called me that, though I had not been inside Mercer Shipping headquarters in almost four years.
“I need a car tomorrow at eight.”
“Where to?”
“Doctor.”
His cup stopped moving.
“Hale?”
“No.”
Cross leaned back.
The chair legs complained against the floor.
“What kind of doctor?”
“An eye specialist.”
The silence was brief but unmistakable.
“Since when?”
“Since now.”
“Does Hale know?”
“No.”
“You want me to tell him?”
“No.”
Cross whistled softly through his nose.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Grant.”
“Daniel.”
He rubbed a hand across his jaw.
I knew the sound of his wedding ring against stubble.
His wife had left him twelve years earlier, but he still wore the ring because, according to him, taking it off felt like admitting she had won an argument.
“You don’t make medical detours for nothing,” he said.
“I’m tired of being examined in my bedroom.”
“So go to Hale’s office.”
“I’m seeing someone else.”
“Why?”
“Second opinion.”
There was a pause.
Then he laughed once.
Not with humor.
“You hate second opinions.”
“I hate first opinions too.”
“That’s more like you.”
He picked up the spoon again, but he did not stir the coffee.
“Who’s taking you?”
“You are.”
“That what you want?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
I turned my face toward him.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
He set the spoon down carefully.
“No reason.”
There are moments when suspicion enters a relationship so quietly that afterward you cannot remember the exact second trust changed shape.
That was one of them.
Cross had not objected.
He had not asked too many questions.
He had behaved almost normally.
Almost was suddenly a dangerous word.
At noon, I went to the office I had once used every day.
Nobody had changed it.
That was meant as respect, but sometimes it felt like a mausoleum.
My father’s brass compass still sat on the desk.
May you like
Caroline’s framed photograph remained somewhere to the left of the computer monitor.
Emma had drawn a purple elephant on the back of an old freight invoice two days before the explosion, and someone had put it beneath glass.
