He studied her again. She imagined he was measuring the distance between them, but she refused to move. She folded her arms and stared back.
“You don’t know me. You didn’t know her. Let’s say we saw the world differently and leave it at that. When she was assigned to go to the SoftChartZ project, I wasn’t surprised.”
Now it was Cheryl Beth’s turn to just watch him. She felt strangely brave.
“Whatever you think you know is wrong.” His small eyes became smaller, darker.
“What do I know?” Cheryl Beth made herself laugh. “I’m just a small-town girl from Kentucky. Just the pain nurse.”
“She was a good doctor. She didn’t want to be in that basement office, you know. They moved her down there.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “By that time she’d broken it off with me. So I never found out.” It was said in the same flat, easy voice. He took a step toward her and Cheryl Beth retreated two steps. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?”
“What doctor are you talking about?” Cheryl Beth tried to draw him out, her gambit to see his handwriting having failed. Say “Chris,” she thought, just like the salutation on the note.
Mason gave a tight smile. “Just a small-town girl who likes to play games. By the way, I thought you had been instructed to not discuss Dr. Lustig’s murder with anyone: colleagues, patients, and absolutely not the press.”
With that, he turned and walked away, striding through the double doors and out into the hospital.
For days, Will had eyed the closet in the big rehab workout room with lust: it held walkers, crutches, four-footed canes and regular canes. He would walk again. He would make himself walk again, whatever noodles he now possessed in place of legs. This spinal cord, it was such a creation. His legs still had the same strong muscles that had existed before the tumor, before the surgery. But the signals couldn’t get through to them. Slowly, some were starting to come back. He did his usual walk up and down the wooden walkway, holding the parallel bars, as Amy guided him from the front and another physical therapist followed them with his wheelchair, in case he needed to suddenly sit. He wouldn’t consider such a defeat. His legs moved more easily, even if they still seemed almost detached from his torso. Amy held the multicolored gait belt she had cinched around his waist-he didn’t know how she could even slow his two hundred pounds if it started down, much less stop it, but the rules were the rules. Back and forth he walked, standing erect. It reminded him that he was a tall person.
