They sat in the alley's quiet. Somewhere a door banged; a cook laughed and went silent.
"My mom always said I was hers from the first minute," Maya said, almost to herself. "She used to tell me — when I was little and had nightmares — she'd say, I chose you and I'd choose you again. I thought it was just something mothers said."
Eleanor's throat tightened. "It was true, either way. You should know that."
Maya looked at her for a long time. The streetlamp above the alley door buzzed faintly, throwing her face into halves of light and shadow.
"Three days," Maya said. "You said the test — how long does it take?"
"The swab can be taken three days from now. Results a week or two after that, depending on the lab." Eleanor tried not to let her voice lift. "Will you do it?"
Maya was quiet. Then: "There's something I haven't told you." She held up her right wrist and pushed back her jacket sleeve. On the inside, pale and thin, ran a short scar. "I've had this since I was a baby. My mom said it was from an IV line when I was sick as an infant. In a clinic."
Eleanor stared at the scar. Her hand rose halfway to her mouth and stopped.
"I don't remember being sick," Maya said. "I just remember her telling me."
Eleanor closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet. "Maya," she said, "what was your mother's maiden name? What did she do before Denver?"
"She was a nurse," Maya said. "At night. She worked nights — she always said she liked the quiet. Before I was born, though —" She faltered. "She never talked about before Denver. Not really."
The siren came back, closer this time, then gone again.
"Friday," Maya said finally. "Three days from now. I'll do the swab. But if it's negative —" She stood, pulling her jacket tighter. "If it's negative, you leave me alone. Promise me."
"I promise," Eleanor said.
Maya walked back toward the alley door, then stopped with her hand on the handle. "The photograph," she said without turning. "Can I see it again? Sometime?"
"Anytime," Eleanor said. "It's yours to look at whenever you want."
The door swung shut behind her. Eleanor sat on the bench a while longer, alone in the cold, and watched her breath rise into the lamplight.
* * *
Chapter 3: December
The snow had started around dinnertime — a thin, mean sleet that rattled the windows of the clinic. Eleanor remembered the sound of it because she had nothing else to do but listen. The room was dim, lit only by the corridor light seeping under the door and the small green eye of the monitor beside the crib.
Lily had a fever. One hundred and two point four. The pediatrician — Dr. Calloway, with his kind, tired hands — had said it was almost certainly viral, that a night of observation was only caution, that three-month-olds ran hot and scared their mothers for sport. Eleanor had nodded as if she believed him and packed the diaper bag with shaking hands, because Lily had been born three months early, because she had spent her first six weeks in an incubator, because Eleanor's body remembered terror.
Richard had wanted to stay. Eleanor could see it in him — the way he stood in the clinic hallway holding the bag with the spare blankets, wanting to be useful. But someone had to call the sitter for nothing, someone had to move the car, someone had to be the one who went home and kept the house from feeling abandoned. He kissed Eleanor's forehead and Lily's, through the crib rails, and said he would be back first thing in the morning, and Eleanor had watched him walk down the corridor until the doors sighed shut behind him.
That was nine hours ago.
The night nurse had been in at eleven and at one. Her name tag said R. CARTER. She was young, with pale hair pulled back and a calm that Eleanor envied the way drowning people envy swimmers. She checked the IV line taped to Lily's wrist — a thin, hateful thread — and said the fever was holding, not climbing, which was good. She showed Eleanor how to dampen the cloth and where to lay it.
"She's beautiful," the nurse said quietly, looking down at Lily.
"She's everything," Eleanor said, and the nurse smiled as if she understood the difference.
At some point after two, Eleanor must have dozed. She did not mean to. She had meant to watch the green eye of the monitor all night, to count her daughter's breaths the way she had counted them in the NICU. But the chair was deep and the room was warm, and the sleet had softened to snow, and exhaustion came up through her the way water comes up through floorboards — slowly, then everywhere.
She dreamed of nothing. That was the strange mercy and the strange cruelty of it: no dream at all, just a dark interval, like a held breath.
She woke because the room was too quiet.
Not silent — hospitals are never silent — but wrong. The monitor still ticked its green eye. The corridor still hummed. But the small, wet, uneven breathing that had filled the room for nine hours was gone.
Eleanor's eyes opened onto the crib.
Empty.