The panel’s written order arrived the next morning. The travel restriction was gone. The hospital’s authorization to operate the ward expired in thirty days unless the pack could prove it had a working evacuation plan and a way to monitor the seal without drawing on either warden.
Thorne had signed the order. Beneath her signature, someone had underlined thirty days twice.
Roesha read it standing at a desk in the nurses’ station. Below the window, an orderly was pushing a woman in slippers across the parking lot. Roesha tried to imagine evacuating the whole building on the night the road washed out.
Dominic came in with two copies of the ward schedule. “I gave Tomas my availability.”
She looked down. Both their names were on it. Dominic had put her down for every night for a month.
“My patients in Chicago are expecting me on Monday,” she said.
“Tomas needed to know we could cover the readings while the observer gets trained.”
“So you told him I’d stay.”
“I thought if he saw both our names, he’d give the plan a chance.”
She set the schedule on the desk. “At the hospital, you promised you’d never make a decision for me to keep me safe. It took you two days to find a better reason.”
He opened his mouth. She could see him about to tell her he’d been scared. She waited to see if he would decide that made it all right.
“You’re right,” he said finally. He took both copies and folded them. “I’ll tell Tomas I put your name down without asking.”
“If the plan fails, that hospital closes.”
“I know.”
“Tell him anyway.”
Dominic told Tomas in front of the whole planning committee. He took the questions, including the one about what authority a suspended Beta thought he had to commit an outside surgeon to a month of unpaid duty. When the committee asked Roesha if she would volunteer, he kept his mouth shut.
“I’ll train two local clinicians and help design the drill,” she said. “Then I go back to Chicago. If you need my body in this building every night, you’ve built the same trap the tribunal wanted.”
Clara called in for the next meeting. She had spent twelve years hearing people say that a Beta’s wife had to make sacrifices for the pack. She asked for the draft emergency plan and read it with the same red pen she used on her students’ essays.
“You’ve got a bus for the walkers,” she said. “Where do the people on oxygen go when the bus is full?”
Nobody had an answer.
“I’m still one of your patients,” she told them. “I’d like one before you hold a press conference.”
◆
Their first drill failed. The ward monitor picked up a knock, and two people tried to clear the same corridor from opposite ends. The second drill was worse. A stretcher got stuck in the service elevator, and the volunteer playing the patient was still inside it when the timer ran out.
On the third morning, Roesha walked into the old ward room and found Dominic on his knees labeling battery packs. He was supposed to be taking the girls to breakfast in forty minutes.
“Go,” she said. “I can finish the labels.”
“Can you read my handwriting?”
She looked at the marker in his hand. “I’m a surgeon. I’ve trained for worse.”
He stood. They were close enough for her to smell soap on his collar. For a moment neither moved. She could have kissed him before he took his next breath. She wanted to badly enough that she put the roll of labels between them.
He took one step back. “Clara and I still have to decide what we’re doing,” he said.
“I know.”
“And I want to kiss you anyway.”
Roesha kept her eyes on him. “I know that, too.”
He left for breakfast. She stood at the table for a long time with the marker uncapped, feeling the difference between being wanted and being free to say yes.
◆
That afternoon, Clara came in for a scan. Dominic brought the girls because he was taking them home afterward, and because Mia had asked to see the room where her mother went when she said she had an appointment. Clara had agreed on the condition that nobody used the word brave to get either girl through a door she didn’t want to open.
Roesha found them in the waiting room. Sophia was trying to push a bandage onto the plush rabbit’s ear. Mia held a paper cup with both hands, watching the double doors.
Mia saw her first. “You’re the doctor from our kitchen.”
“I am,” Roesha said. She looked at Clara. “May I sit?”
Clara’s hand stopped halfway to the zipper on Sophia’s coat. “You can sit.”
Roesha took the chair across from them. Sophia held up the rabbit. The bandage had stuck to her thumb.
“Did he hurt his ear?” Roesha asked.
“No. He heard the bang. He doesn’t want to hear it again.”
Roesha had a dozen things she could have said about the armed men and why they couldn’t come back. She was glad she stopped long enough to hear what Sophia had actually told her.
“Then we can give him somewhere quiet to wait.” She held out her hand, palm up, for the bandage. “Would you like to put him in your coat pocket so he can hear your heart?”
Sophia peeled it off her thumb and considered the pocket. Then she scooted across the gap between the chairs and held her coat open so Roesha could help. Clara watched Sophia rest her cheek against Roesha’s sleeve for the few seconds it took to tuck the rabbit inside.
“Does my mom have to come here forever?” Mia asked.
“Edward’s checking how she’s healing. You can ask him what he sees on the scan if your mom says it’s all right.”
Mia turned to Clara. “Can I?”
“Yes,” Clara said. “I’d like you to hear it with me.”
Mia looked down into her cup. “A kid at school said you’re Dad’s mate. His dad saw the video.”
Dominic had been standing by the coat hooks. He came across the room and crouched in front of Mia, but she kept her eyes on Roesha.
“Does that mean you get to be our mom when you’re at our house?”
“No,” Roesha said. “You have a mom. And your dad and I aren’t together.”
“Do you want to be?”
The room was quiet enough that Roesha could hear Sophia’s shoe tapping the chair leg. She wanted to give Mia an answer she could hold onto. She couldn’t give her a promise her father hadn’t made.
“That’s a question your dad and I have to talk about when we’re alone,” she said. “Whatever happens, you get to love both your parents. Nobody gets to ask you to pick.”
Clara reached for Mia’s cup. Her fingers were shaking, so she set it on the floor instead of trying to carry it.
Dominic took Mia’s hand. “I should have asked what people were saying at school. I didn’t want to bring it up because I didn’t know what to say. That left you to figure it out by yourself, and I’m sorry.”
Sophia reached down into her pocket. “Can the rabbit come to see the picture of Mom’s insides?”
“He’d better,” Clara said. “I’m counting on him to ask the questions I forget.”
Mia laughed. Clara managed to laugh with her. Only Dominic saw how hard she pressed her thumb into her wedding ring.
◆
After the scan, Dominic walked the girls out to Elena’s car. Clara waited for Roesha by the clinic door. She had taken off her coat but was still holding it closed across her middle.
“I wanted Sophia to come sit with me when she got scared,” Clara said. “Then she went to you, and I was glad somebody knew what to do. I hated that I was glad.”
Roesha could think of nothing to say that would make it easier.
“You handled her beautifully,” Clara went on. “That makes this worse for me. I can imagine my girls liking you. I can imagine them asking if you’ll come next time. I’ve spent days thinking about my marriage ending, and somehow I never let myself get as far as that.”
Dominic came back through the door. Clara raised a hand before he could speak.
“I’m still going on Wednesday,” she said. “I still want to give counseling a chance. But we need to tell the girls more than where you’re sleeping. They’re hearing about us from people who have no business telling them anything.”
“I’ll talk to their teacher,” Dominic said.
“We’ll talk to her together.” Clara looked from him to Roesha. “And if there ever comes a day when you two have something to tell the girls, you tell me first. I want time to decide how I’m going to answer their questions. I won’t sit in another waiting room and find out the children already know.”
“I’ll tell you first,” Dominic said.
Clara waited.
“So will I,” Roesha said. “And I won’t ask them to keep anything from you.”
Clara took her coat from her arm and pulled it on slowly. “All right. That’s what we can agree to today.”
Dominic offered to walk Roesha back to the ward. She nearly said yes. She wanted to put her forehead against his shoulder and tell him how much it had hurt to answer Mia honestly. Instead, she looked through the glass. Mia had turned around in the back seat to see if her father was coming.
“Go with them,” Roesha said. “She’s still watching for you.”
He looked out at the car. Then he went.
Roesha stayed where she was until Mia turned back around.
◆
On the last day, the observers ran the drill while Roesha was in Chicago and Dominic was at Mia’s school assembly. The alarm reached the right people. The stretchers cleared the building. The independent monitor never dropped a reading. The hospital kept its authorization, and Roesha got the news between two cases from Clara, who sent a photograph of the signed order with every blank space crossed out in red.