Sara held Jared’s hand. The palm was calloused. Jeffrey’s hands had always felt smooth. His nails had been trimmed, not bitten to the quick. His cuticles weren’t torn at the edges. Sometimes, Sara had caught him using the oatmeal-scented lotion she’d kept on the table by their bed.
Lena stood up from the chair.
Sara’s heart hammered in her chest. She didn’t know why. Just being in the same room with Lena made her feel nervous. Even with the cop outside. Even knowing that there was no way Lena could harm her, Sara felt unsafe.
And Lena, as usual, was oblivious. She stood by the bed. She didn’t touch Jared. Didn’t reach down to ease him or to reassure herself that he was still there. Instead of holding him, she held herself. Her arms were wrapped around her waist. She had always been so goddamn self-contained.
“Sara—” Lena breathed. It was more like a sob. Lena had never been ashamed to cry. She used it to great effect. She hissed in a mouthful of air, her body shaking from the effort. Her hand gripped the railing on the bed. Her wedding ring was yellow gold with a small diamond. Blood was caked into the setting. She was waiting for Sara to say something, to make it all better.
Automatically, the words came to Sara’s mind, the advice she had given over countless hospital beds: It’s okay to touch him. Hold his hand. Talk to him. Kiss him. Ignore all the tubes coming out of his body and lie beside him. Let him know on some basic level that he is not alone. That you are here to help him fight his way back.
Sara said none of this. Instead, she chewed at the tip of her tongue until she tasted blood. Her heart was still pounding. The fear was gone. A coldness had taken over. Sara could feel it moving through her body, its icy fingers wrapping around her torso, scratching at her throat.
“I can’t—” Lena’s voice caught. For Sara, it was like listening to herself five years ago. Just with those two words, she felt it all over again. The devastation. The loss. The loneliness.
“I can’t—” Lena repeated. “I can’t do it. I can’t live without him.”
Sara gently pulled her hand away from Jared’s. She smoothed down the sheet, tucked it in close around his side. She looked at Lena—really looked at her straight in the eye.
“Good,” Sara told her. “Now you know how it feels.”
6.
Will rode his motorcycle around the Macon General parking lot until he spotted Sara’s BMW. It was a stupid thing to do, but he was feeling pretty stupid lately anyway. She’d bypassed the doctors’ lot and found a spot in the back under a stand of shade trees. He suppressed the desire to get off his bike and touch the hood of her car. Will told himself it was only to see how long she’d been there, but deep down he knew he wanted some kind of connection.
Which was embarrassing and pathetic enough to make him gun the engine and proceed to the employee lot at an unadvisable speed.
Fortunately, burning some rubber in the parking lot was exactly the kind of thing his alter ego would do. Will had gone undercover before. He liked to think that he was pretty good at getting into character. There were some happily retired chickens in North Georgia who could attest to his skills. While busting a cockfighting ring was not as dangerous as his current assignment, the GBI’s information officers had managed to give Will an even more impressive cover this time around.
As with the day laborers outside the Home Depot, Will imagined that Bill Black, his cover ID, provided a glimpse into what could have been. The man was a con, the sort of guy who knew his way around the system. He had a sealed juvie record and a dishonorable discharge from the Air Force. More important, there were three serious charges on his adult sheet—two for knocking around various women and another for pushing a mall cop down an escalator.
The latter charge had landed Bill Black in the Fulton County jail for ninety days. He’d been paroled for good behavior, but was kept on a tight leash by a parole officer who reported directly back to Amanda. The PO had already dropped by the hospital a few times for surprise check-ins. Bill Black was a scary guy. There were other crimes that the cops were looking at him for. A gas station stickup. Some messy business up in Kentucky. An assault that left a man blind in one eye. Black was what those in the know called a person of interest.
The GBI had managed to locate a couple of snitches who were willing to back up Black’s cover story in exchange for leniency. Another con told Will all the gossip floating around the jail during the time in which Bill Black was incarcerated. The guards had confirmed the lurid details, which sounded like a mash-up of Cool Hand Luke and The Sopranos. Then they had taken some unflattering photos of Will holding up a placard with Black’s name and inmate number. Aside from the lack of any pathetic jailhouse tattoos, Will would’ve been hard-pressed to find the holes in his backstory.
Of course, there were always holes to be found, but Will wasn’t about to share the biggest one with Amanda: the name Bill Black, which Amanda had proudly presented to Will as if on a silver platter, made his brain feel like it belonged in a Salvador Dalí painting.
“Bill rhymes with Will,” she’d told him, handing over the dossier he was required to memorize. “And of course Black is a color.”
Will gathered from her demeanor that he was supposed to be grateful. The truth was, she might as well have thrown on a leotard and acted out the name in interpretive dance.
Will was dyslexic, a fact that Amanda only trotted out when she couldn’t find a sharper knife in her drawer. He wasn’t about to have an open conversation about his problem—that was what the Internet was for—but if Amanda had bothered to look it up, she would’ve realized dyslexia wasn’t a reading disorder, but a language-processing disorder. Which was why Will had no ear for rhymes and couldn’t understand how Black could be a color when the capital letter meant that it was a name.
But Will had sat in Amanda’s office and thumbed through Bill Black’s file like it made perfect sense.
“Looks good,” he’d told her.
She hadn’t been convinced. “You want me to help you with the big words?”
Will had closed the file and left her office.
He could read—he wasn’t a complete imbecile—but it took some time and a lot of patience. Over the years, Will had learned a few tricks to help him pass as more fluent. Holding a ruler under a line of text to keep the letters from jumping around. Using the computer to dictate his reports or read his emails. He’d been told in school that he read on a second-grade level. Not that his teachers had formally diagnosed him with anything other than stupidity. Will was in college when he finally learned that what he had was called dyslexia, but it was too late by then for him to do anything but pray to God that no one found out.
For the most part, not many people did. Amanda seemed happy to keep it as a weapon in her arsenal. Faith had discovered it during their first case, and whenever anything involving reading came up, she took on a maternal tone that made Will want to stick his head in a wood chipper.
And of course Sara knew. She’d figured it out immediately. Will guessed being a doctor helped her recognize the signs. The weird part was that she treated him no different from before. She saw his dyslexia as just another part of Will, like the color of his hair or the size of his feet.
She saw him as normal.