The sound came again.
No more thinking.
Lena pulled back the panel.
5.
Sara had only visited Macon a handful of times, but she’d always gotten the impression that the city was one forever stuck in limbo, caught between the liberal state capital less than one hundred miles north and the smaller, more conservative towns that made up the majority of the state. Most Atlantans never gave Macon a second thought, but everything about Macon seemed to strain with the need to impress its wealthier neighbor.
Macon General Hospital was a perfect example of this endless striving. Even as Sara pulled into the freshly paved parking lot, she couldn’t help but notice the difference in scale between the towering monolith of Grady and the three architecturally ornate brick buildings that made up the much smaller county medical complex. Up until the 1960s, Grady had been segregated into two different wards—one for black and one for white. As with many areas in the modern South, a different sort of segregation had taken hold in Macon. It wasn’t about race anymore, but class. All were welcome so long as they could afford the entrance fee.
Sara didn’t realize she had driven to the back of the parking lot until she noticed the exit signs. She pulled into a space under some trees. For a few minutes, she just sat in the car, trying to decide what to do next. Then her brain took over and made her hand open the door, her feet hit the asphalt, her legs move as she walked toward the hospital. The large fountain in the middle of the circular drive sent up a wet mist as she passed by. The rhythmic lapping of water was probably meant to calm visitors, but to Sara, the sound only managed to further set her teeth on edge.
She felt time roll back as she walked toward the front doors of the main hospital building—not by decades, but by years. Just like that, she was in Grant County again, transported back to the day her husband had been murdered. Sara’s body made the connection before her brain did. It was probably all the police officers, a sea of blue that filled the parking lot, the front entrance, the lobby.
The sight of them sent a jolt of adrenaline straight into Sara’s heart. Her ears filled with a high-pitched ringing. Her head ached. Her muscles twitched. It was as if all the wires that held together her body had suddenly gone taut.
Or maybe it wasn’t adrenaline. Maybe it was anger, because by the time Sara walked into the hospital, she was so angry that she could barely function.
No—she wasn’t just angry. She was furious.
Furious to be here. Furious that she wasn’t home taking a shower or eating breakfast or walking the dogs or sleeping in her bed or going about her normal life. Furious that yet again, she’d become ensnared in another one of Lena Adams’s deadly webs.
If the wires had gone taut, it was only because Lena had pulled them.
The rage had started its slow build in the Grady ER, the moment Sara hung up with Nell. Sara had heard it humming in the background, like a song she couldn’t remember the words to. She’d called Will. She’d packed the spare clothes and toiletries she kept at the hospital. She’d made arrangements with the dog sitter, her department head, her students. She’d filled up her car with gas. She’d driven just above the speed limit as she made her way out of the city. Jared needed her. Darnell needed her. That was what kept Sara moving forward. They were the only two things that mattered. Sara had a duty to be there for them. She owed it to Jeffrey. She owed it to Jared and Nell.
But by the halfway mark to Macon, the song got louder, and Sara’s brain started adding words to the melody.
Jeffrey. Lena’s partner. Sara’s husband.
Sara’s life.
She had held him in her arms as he lay dying. She had stroked her fingers through his thick hair one last time. She had touched the rough skin of his cheek one last time. She had pressed her lips to his, felt his ragged last breaths in her mouth. She had begged him not to leave even as she watched the life slowly leave his beautiful eyes.
Sara had wanted to follow him. Grief set her adrift, unmoored her from everything that mattered. Weeks went by, months, but the pain was a relentless tide that would not ebb. Finally, Sara had taken too many pills. She’d told her mother it was a mistake, but Sara hadn’t made a mistake. She’d wanted to die, and when she found that she could not die, the only thing she could do was start over.
She’d left her family, her home, her life, and moved to Atlanta. She had bought an apartment that was nothing like the house she’d shared with Jeffrey. She’d purchased furniture that Jeffrey would not have liked, dressed in clothes he would never expect her to wear. Sara had even taken a job Jeffrey had never seen her do. She’d made her life into something that worked without him.
And she’d met Will.
Will.
The thought of his name smoothed down some of the sharp edges. Sara wanted so badly to be with him right now that she almost turned around. She saw herself getting into her car, heading toward the highway, retracing her steps back to Atlanta.
There was a clingy red dress hanging in Sara’s closet. She would wear it with the painfully high heels that made Will lick his lips every time he saw them. Sara would brush out her hair, wear it down around her shoulders the way he liked. She would darken her eyeliner, load up on the mascara. She would wear a touch of perfume everywhere she wanted him to kiss her. And as soon as he walked through the door, Sara would tell Will that she was deeply, irrevocably in love with him. She’d never said the words to him before. Never found the right time.
Time.
A sharp, startling memory jolted Sara out of her plans. She was at her old house standing in front of the fireplace. What was she wearing? Sara didn’t have to think for long. She was in the same black dress she’d worn to her husband’s funeral. Days had passed before her mother managed to get Sara to take off the dress, to shower, to change into something that didn’t carry the stench of Jeffrey’s death.
And still, Sara had kept returning to the fireplace. She could not stop staring at the cherrywood clock on the mantel. It was a beautiful old thing, a wedding gift to Sara’s grandmother that had been passed to Sara, just like the watch she wore on her wrist. That Sara had inherited two timepieces was not something she’d ever considered remarkable. What she remembered most from the days after the funeral was watching the second hand move on her grandmother’s clock, hearing the loud tick of the gears marking time.
Sara had stopped the clock. She had put her watch in a drawer. She had unplugged the clock beside her bed—their bed that she could no longer sleep in. She had found some electrician’s tape in Jeffrey’s workbench and covered the clock on the microwave, the stove, the cable box. It became an obsession. No one could enter the house with a watch. No one could remark on the passage of time. Anything that reminded Sara that life was moving on without Jeffrey had to be hidden from sight.
“Mrs. Tolliver?”
Sara felt another jolt. She’d stopped walking. She was standing stock-still in the middle of the hospital lobby as if lightning had struck.
“Mrs. Tolliver?” the man repeated. He was older, with a shock of white-gray hair and a well-trimmed mustache.
As with Nell’s phone call, Sara’s memory took a few seconds to cull information from her past. She finally said, “Chief Gray.”
He smiled warmly at Sara, though there was a familiar reserve in his eyes. Sara thought of it as the Widow Look—not the look a widow gave, but the one she received. The one that said the viewer didn’t quite know what to say because, secretly, all he or she could feel was so damn lucky it hadn’t happened to them.