Chapter 3
I turned. She was standing with her chair scraped back behind her, her hand no longer on her stomach but at her side, her expression somewhere between question and accusation. She had the instincts of someone raised in a family where information was currency, and she had just watched my face do something I was not aware it had done.
"Who is she?" Yara asked.
I did not answer, because there was no answer I could give her that did not unravel something — either the lie I had been building about the nature of my involvement with her, or the one I had been building for nine months about why I had left Brin in the first place. Both structures could not survive the honest answer to a simple question asked in a hospital corridor.
I walked toward the maternity unit.
I heard Yara say my name again behind me, and then the sound of her heels on the polished floor, following, and then Royce intercepting — I heard the low exchange of voices without the words — and then I was through the first set of doors and Yara was not.
The maternity corridor was different from the VIP wing the way emergencies are different from appointments. Bright overhead lights. Nurses moving with the specific urgency that does not perform itself. A cart hitting a doorframe. Somewhere ahead, the sound of a monitor accelerating.
May you like
I reached the nurses' station. A woman with silver-streaked hair looked up from a chart and saw my face and registered something — not recognition of my name, but recognition of the category of person standing in front of her, the kind that produces a very careful response.
"Can I help you, sir?"
