Nora’s POV
Marcus's text sat on my phone screen for three full seconds before I turned it face down. Three hours. I looked at the window. Full dark outside — not transitional dark, not seven o'clock dark, but the committed settled dark of a city past nine that had finished its dinner and moved on. The ward outside had gone to its nighttime register: quieter footsteps, dimmed overheads, the monitors doing their work without the daytime layer of noise over the top of everything.
I had come in here at six-fifteen. I looked at my phone. Nine forty-eight. Then I looked at the chair.
I had pulled it to the far side of the room when I came in. Deliberately. With full awareness of what I was doing and why — across from him, not beside him, the correct distance for where we were. I had been prec
