The doctors’ lounge on the third floor of St. Jude’s smelled of damp wool, scorched instant chicory, and the ancient upholstery of three vinyl armchairs that had lost their stuffing in the 1980s.
Through the tall, grime-caked windows, the smokestacks of the naval foundry across the river belched plumes of rust-colored smoke into the gray afternoon sky.
Severin sat at the scarred oak table, his elbows braced on the wood, his forehead resting in the palms of his hands.
His scrubs were stiff with dried sweat and betadine wash from a six-hour bilateral femoral debridement that had ended forty minutes ago. The patient—an old ironmonger whose legs had been crushed by an overhead crane—had survived, but Severin’s hands felt as though they had been dipped in liquid lead.
A heavy ceramic mug slid across the table, stopping two inches from his thumb.
The aroma hit his nostrils before he could lift his head.
Real coffee.
Not the burned rye-and-chicory meal the hospital canteen served out of five-gallon zinc urns. Deep, oily, dark-roasted beans that carried the bitter, rich sweetness of imported South American arabica.
Severin looked up.
Dr. Tariq Vance pulled out the wooden chair opposite him, sitting down with the heavy, uncoordinated groan of a man whose lumbar spine had surrendered all elasticity twenty years ago. In his right hand, Tariq held a wax-paper parcel that gave off the warm, yeasty scent of freshly baked poppy-seed rolls.
"Drink it," Tariq said, sliding the pastry toward Severin. "Don't ask where I got it. Let's just say a certain customs inspector on Berth Four had an incarcerated inguinal hernia that required midnight intervention without municipal paperwork."
Severin reached for the mug. The warmth of the ceramic seeped into his chilled knuckles, loosening the stiffness in his distal joints.
He took a sip. The bitter heat was an electric jolt against his dry tongue.
"Thank you, Tariq," Severin murmured, his voice hoarse.
Tariq didn't smile.
He leaned back in the creaking chair, folding his arms across his broad chest, his dark eyes studying Severin with the unsparing, diagnostic gaze of a seasoned trauma chief.
"You've lost fourteen pounds, Severin," Tariq said, his voice dropping into a quiet, measured cadence that carried the weight of fifteen years of shared surgical bays. "Your scrubs are hanging off your clavicles like a bedsheet on a fence post. Your resting pulse is ninety-two. And Nurse Kestra told me she found you sleeping on the concrete floor of the linen supply closet on Tuesday."
Severin took another sip of the coffee, looking out the window at the distant cranes of the harbor.
"I was waiting for the path reports on the sepsis case in Bed Six."
"Bullshit," Tariq said, without raising his voice. "You haven't slept in an actual bed since October eighteenth."
Tariq leaned forward, his forearms resting on the scarred table. His knuckles were thick, scarred from twenty years of needle-sticks and bone saws, his fingernails scrubbed clean to the pink beds.
"The police closed the file, Sev," Tariq whispered. "Inspector Vane signed the terminal disposition on Monday. Presumed drowned. Case inactive."
Severin’s jaw tightened until the masseter muscles knotted like walnuts along his jawline.
"The police are corrupt bureaucrats who take envelopes from the canal syndicates," Severin said coldly. "They didn't even dust the radiator for fingerprints. They didn't test the blood on the floorboards."
"Because there was nothing to test, Severin!" Tariq’s voice cracked with a sudden, desperate pain that surprised them both. "It was a break-in. It was three in the morning in a district where people kill each other for four ounces of salt pork! The city is rotting, Sev! People disappear every single night! Ten women were pulled out of the canal basin last month alone!"
Severin set the coffee mug down with a sharp, controlled click against the wood.
He looked straight into Tariq’s eyes.
"Mireille is not in the canal basin."
"You don't know that," Tariq pleaded, reaching across the table to grab Severin’s sleeve with a tight, trembling grip. "Severin... listen to me. As your friend. As the man who stood next to you when we opened forty chests in forty-eight hours during the foundry riots. Look at what you're doing to yourself. You're wandering the Low Docks with bruised knuckles and blood on your boots. You're going to get yourself stabbed in an alley by some crackhead with an iron file, and for what?"
"For my wife," Severin said.
Tariq closed his eyes. A deep, shuddering sigh shook his shoulders.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a brass key attached to an enameled red plastic tag.
He laid it on the table between them.
"My sister’s flat on High Street," Tariq said softly. "She's in the capital until spring. It has heat. It has running water that doesn't smell of sulfur. There's a spare bedroom with a clean mattress."
Severin looked at the key.
"Tariq—"
"Take it," Tariq commanded, his eyes burning with an affection that was painful in its sincerity. "Just for two nights, Sev. Take seventy-two hours of sick leave. Let me cover the trauma rotation. Sleep in a bed where her ghost isn't sitting on the radiator. Please."
Severin stared at the red plastic tag.
For three seconds, the crushing, unendurable weight of his exhaustion nearly broke his spine. He wanted to take the key. He wanted to lie down in a warm room with clean sheets and sleep until the gray rain of Port Veridia washed the memory of her blood from his hands.
Then he remembered the splintered door.
The crushed spruce of the cello on the pine floorboards.
Severin pushed the key back across the table with one calloused finger.
"Cover my four o'clock shift tomorrow," Severin said, his voice flat, steady, and dead. "That’s all I need."
Tariq looked at the key. He looked at Severin.
A look of terrible, helpless grief settled over his features—the look a surgeon gives when the monitor flatlines and the chest cavity is too dry to restart.
"God help you, Severin," Tariq whispered, picking up the key and sliding it back into his pocket.
"He won't," Severin said, standing up from the table. "He doesn't work the night shift."