Part 2
She smoothed the blanket over Rafael’s arm and stepped out to complete her charting. Dominic let her pass without a question, but his attention followed her into the corridor.
The following morning, she found him beside his sedan with two paper cups balanced in one hand.
Claire slowed on the hospital steps. “I’ve already arranged my way home.”
“I’m not here to replace it.” He offered one of the cups, then seemed to reconsider the order of things. “Would you have coffee with me?”
She looked from the cup to his face.
“That sounded difficult.”
“It’s unfamiliar.”
“Coffee?”
“Waiting for an answer.”
She took the cup. Black, without sugar. She had mentioned how she drank it while talking to Rafael, with Wade somewhere in the hall.
“Your people have excellent hearing.”
“They do.”
“Well, I’ve got a few blocks in me.”
They walked along the edge of the hospital district, past a delivery truck unloading breakfast supplies and a florist washing buckets on the sidewalk. Dominic asked about her family. Claire told him about her father’s operation and her mother’s night work, then found herself explaining the payment she made every month.
He listened without offering to erase it. That restraint surprised her more than the expensive coat or the car.
“And that’s why you wouldn’t take the envelope,” he said.
“I don’t want gratitude turning into somebody else’s authority.”
He was quiet until they reached the next corner.
“That’s a rule I understand.”
“Understanding it and living by it are different jobs, Mr. Caruso.”
“Dominic.”
She took a sip instead of trying his first name. A pedestrian approaching them moved aside before Dominic had done anything to require it. Claire watched the little detour, then looked at him.
“I know what gets printed about you. That doesn’t tell me who’s standing here.”
His answer came before he could make it guarded.
“I’m not sure I could tell you that, either.”
He looked surprised by his own admission. Claire didn’t rescue him from it. They kept walking.
The man in the gray hoodie appeared outside her building two days later. Claire noticed him because he stayed beneath the same bus-stop sign after two buses had gone by.
Then she saw him in the hospital cafeteria. On the third occasion, she caught his reflection in a darkened shop window while she walked to work. She changed direction; a moment later, he did too.
She was considering whether to speak to hospital security when she came out after her shift and found two unfamiliar men waiting below the steps.
One approached her. “Miss Whitaker, Mr. Caruso asked us to make sure you get home safely.”
Her fear found something solid to push against.
She called Dominic before leaving the entrance.
“Did you station people outside my workplace?”
“There’s a man following you.”
“I know. I’m the person he’s following.”
“Claire, I couldn’t leave you unprotected.”
“You could have called me.” She gripped the phone hard enough to feel its edge in her palm. “You could have told me what was happening and let me decide what help I wanted.”
He began to answer, but she kept going.
“I grew up watching people with money make choices for people without it. They always had a nice reason. I won’t have my life arranged behind my back.”
The two guards waited a few feet away, suddenly studying the traffic.
For several breaths, the traffic outside the hospital was the only sound. Claire lowered the phone to check it; they were still connected.
“I should have put the choice to you,” Dominic said at last. “Do you want those men to leave, or will you let them stay?”
Her grip on the phone eased.
“For the next week, yes—provided you tell me exactly what you’re protecting me from.”
He told her there was trouble inside his organization. Someone had been working against him, and she had been seen in his company. He couldn’t yet tell her every name or every reason. He could tell her the danger was real.
“I thought keeping it from you would keep you from being afraid,” he said. “That was a bad decision. I’m sorry.”
It was the first apology he had offered anyone in seven years.
“All right,” Claire said. “One week.”
She walked down the steps and asked the waiting men their instructions herself.
On Tuesday night, the sedan sat in a dark corner of the staff parking lot. Claire almost passed it. She had worked late, and her head was full of unfinished charts and the question of whether she had enough clean uniforms to reach the weekend.
Then she saw that Dominic was in the passenger seat.
His coat was still buttoned. He sat bent forward, turning a small silver hair clip between his fingers. Each turn caught a little light from the hospital windows.
Claire stood beside the car long enough to understand that he hadn’t noticed her. Then she went around to the driver’s door and got in.
She set her bag at her feet. Neither of them spoke.
The clip had a bent prong. Dominic ran his thumb over it several times before he stopped.
“My sister would have been twenty-six,” he said.
Claire stayed still.
“All Elena needed was a ride home after a party. The arrangements were in the hands of someone I trusted.” His gaze fixed on the dashboard. “That was seven years ago tonight. She was nineteen when a bomb intended for me killed her.”
She understood why he had chosen this seat before he continued.
“This is the same model. I keep buying the same one. I sit on that side, and nobody sits here.” His fingers closed around the clip. “Not Wade. Not family. Nobody.”
“Until I blundered in.”
“You had no idea there was a rule.”
“No.”
His voice had been almost conversational. Claire knew that careful evenness. She had heard it in family rooms from people who could state every medical detail but could not yet say the name of the person they had lost.
She took a bottle of water from her bag, followed by an oat bar left over from her break. She put them within his reach.
“Keep me company while you have a drink and a few bites,” she said. “I can see that tremor again, and your mouth looks dry.”
He looked at the food, then at her.
“You don’t have to carry the conversation. I can listen while you talk about Elena, or supply you with the complete list of things that went wrong at work. Either is fine.”
Dominic unscrewed the bottle. His first swallow was small; the next was longer.
“People usually tell me what I should do with this,” he said, lifting the hand that held the clip. “Move on. Remember her. Make peace. They have a lot of instructions.”
“I’m only qualified to give you the eating-and-drinking ones.”
He looked down at the oat bar. “You really do think I’m a man who missed dinner.”
“You’re making a strong case for it.”
The sound that escaped him was brief and rough. Claire didn’t stare at him for it. He hadn’t laughed since Elena’s funeral, and he seemed uncertain what to do with the sensation.
He opened the wrapper.
They remained in the parked car while a light rain dotted the windshield. Claire told him why she couldn’t pass somebody who needed help. Her father had fallen in a grocery aisle, and forty people had gone around him before one stopped.
“Forty,” Dominic repeated.
“My mother counted. She was trying to get somebody to listen.” Claire picked at a loose thread on her bag. “I wasn’t there. I can’t change that part. But I can stop when it’s somebody else.”
Dominic put the silver clip on his knee.
“Elena laughed before the joke was finished,” he said. “Every time. She’d spoil it for whoever was telling it, then laugh harder because they were annoyed.”
He told Claire about that laugh, and she let him. When he fell silent, she described a supply cupboard nobody could keep organized and a patient who had apologized for bleeding on her shoes.
The rain ended. Delivery vehicles began entering the hospital lot. By the time the windows reflected the pale light of morning, neither of them had opened a door.
Claire looked at the little clip once more, then at him.
“There’s something I should have told you sooner,” she said. “It’s about Lawrence…”
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