I AWOKE TO FIND A STRANGE HAND ON MY SHOULDER, shaking me gently. The hand was attached to a nurse, who’d found Miranda and me slumped and sleeping in chairs in the surgery waiting room. I checked the wall clock: Four hours had passed since the surgery ended. Before falling asleep, I’d spent a while checking my many voice-mail messages and returning a handful of the calls. Steve Morgan had called; I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk with him after the FBI press conference, so he’d phoned to relay his personal good wishes, as well as those of the TBI. “I should have known there was a good reason—a very good reason—for whatever you were doing,” he said when I called him back. “I forgot some of the most important lessons you taught me in your class—lessons about character and integrity and trust. I’ll try not to forget those again.”
I also returned a call from Burt DeVriess. He’d dropped the Willoughby paternity suit, he said—his client was not, the DNA reported, Willoughby’s child—but he was suing for $20 million on behalf of Willoughby’s legitimate daughter and the former students who’d paid for the burial of Miss Elizabeth Jenkins. Most of the voice mails turned out to be media calls—from WBIR-TV, CNN, theKnoxville News Sentinel, theNational Enquirer, and a host of other news outlets I didn’t know or didn’t care about. Mercifully, my cell phone’s battery died just as my brain and body began shutting down, so I had a good excuse for ignoring the majority of the messages clamoring for my attention. At the moment, though, it was the scrub-clad nurse tugging at my sleepy sleeve. “He’s awake, and he’d like to see you both.” She smiled.
Miranda and I struggled to our feet. The nurse took us up an elevator and down a hall to an ICU room, which bristled with monitors. Through the large panel of glass that faced the nurses’ station, I saw Carmen sitting beside the head of the bed, stroking her husband’s cheek. Eddie opened his eyes and smiled groggily when we came into the room. “My friends,” he murmured.
“My good, good friends.” Then his eyes closed again.
His arms were fastened into an elaborate traction harness above the bed. Protruding from the ends of the arms were a pair of white oval bundles, roughly the size and shape of handmade loaves of bread. Five fingertips protruded from the end of each loaf. The swaddled hands looked awkward and out of place, strangely foreign, because just twenty-four hours before there had been nothing there. Nothing but emptiness and loss.
The hands—like the surgery’s outcome, and like Eddie’s future, and like all our hopes for it—hung in the air, suspended. And just for a moment, those bright white bundles of suspense and hope were transformed. In my mind they shone like a pair of binary stars at the center of the universe, and they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen, or ever would.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:FACT AND FICTION
“THIS BOOK IS A WORK OF FICTION,” READS THEdisclaimer in the front of this novel. “Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”