She told him about the hospital. Not everything — not the specific texture of her mother's hands or the thing she had decided in that room, which he sensed belonged to her privately — but the shape of it, the fact of it, the reason for the two hours between Julian's message and her reply. He listened without interrupting, which was not something he did instinctively and which cost him something, and which he could see her registering with the peripheral precision she brought to everything.
"She doesn't know," Elena said. "About any of it. She thinks I do corporate work on the side. I told her three years ago that I'd taken on some private clients and she accepted it because she needed to and because—" She stopped. "Because she trusts me."
He said nothing. There was nothing useful to say
