Page 134 of The Final Cut

There were no pictures tucked behind books, no names spoken too softly over coffee, no old heartbreak he let slip on bad nights. Cal had me. Work. Routines. Pancakes when he didn’t know what to say and threats when I tried to leave the house in weather he didn’t like. He had quietude. He had patience. He had secrets, apparently, because there’s a woman in his room touching him like grief gave her permission.

The machines keep breathing for him.

The woman lowers his hand back to the blanket and wipes beneath one eye with the heel of her palm. Then she leans close and presses her mouth to his knuckles, a soft, careful kiss that makes something hot and ugly open inside me.

I came here for Cal. Now I can’t move.

She turns toward the door.

I step back fast, pulling into the shadow near an empty supply alcove. Deacon moves with me, silent as guilt. The woman leaves Cal’s room and walks down the hall without looking our way. She carries herself carefully, every step measured, but her shoulders shake once before she gets control of them.

I follow.

Deacon stays behind me.

He could stop me. He does not.

The woman takes the hallway to the small chapel near the older wing, the one I passed earlier and ignored because I have never understood how people can pray in hospitals without feeling like they are bargaining with a locked door. She pushes inside, and the door whispers shut behind her.

I stand outside it with my pulse in my throat.

“What the hell was that?” I ask.

Deacon’s face is unreadable in the dim hall.

“Reva…”

“No. Don’t say my name like that. Who is that woman?”

His jaw tightens, and fear laced with suspicion arrives. Slow. Insidious. A dark bloom spreading through my chest.

“Who is she, Deacon?”

He does not answer fast enough.

I push through the chapel door.

The room is small, with rows of wooden pews, a few electric candles trembling near a simple cross, and stained glass gone black with night. It smells faintly of wax, old hymnals, and lemon cleaner, because even holy rooms in hospitals have to be disinfected. The woman kneels in the front pew with her head bowed and her hands clasped tightly.

I stay near the back.

Anger gives me a spine when the floor feels unreliable.

She is praying. Or trying to. Her mouth moves without sound. Once, her hand lifts to press against her chest, and the motion pulls at something in me because I know it. I do not know from where. A memory without a picture. A gesture seen through a child’s eyes, filed away with a kitchen, a hallway, someone humming in another room.

I slide into the last pew, and the wood creaks. The woman stills.

I should speak first. I have earned that much. I should ask why she was in Cal’s room, why she touched him, why he never told me about her, why she said ‘her’ like I was a package he failed to deliver.

But my mouth will not work.

The woman rises slowly. One hand closes around the end of the pew as she steps into the aisle. She turns and sees me.

Everything in her stops.

One foot misses the next step. Her hand shoots out for the pew again, fingers closing hard around the wood. Her face loses all its careful neutrality.

I stand because my body knows something before my mind does. The anger falls away so abruptly I have nothing under it. No plan. No words. No air.