THE PRICE OF ASH

Marsh

They came for her a little after nine. Not a normal discharge, close enough to pass as one from a distance. A wheelchair, a change of clothes in a plain bag, and a man she hadn't met yet giving instructions in a voice pitched low enough that the nurse two beds over wouldn't catch the details.

He didn't introduce himself either. Big, the kind of big that made the doorway look smaller, hands too careful with the folded clothes for someone that size. She decided, watching him refold one corner of the bag exactly once, that he'd done this before. Not the folding. The rest of it.

Okafor met them at the door with a card that turned out to have her cell number written on the back in pen. "Any time," she said. "It rings a real phone." She didn't say what kind of wrong she meant. She didn't have to.

He wheeled her himself, through a service corridor and past a loading dock, where a man in a security jacket stood checking a delivery truck against a clipboard list. He glanced at the wheelchair, then at the transfer form clipped to its arm, and held it there longer than Ivy would have liked.

"This transfer's not on this morning's list," he said.

"Added late." The big man didn't slow down. "Check page two."

He checked it. Whatever was written there ended the conversation, and he waved them through without asking anything else.

Into the back of a car already running. Rhys was inside.

"Morning," he said. Nothing about his voice suggested anything unusual.

Ivy let herself be settled into the seat and watched the door close instead of answering.

Emmett drove. Forty minutes in, his phone rang in the cupholder, loud enough that everyone in the car heard it before he did.

He looked at the screen. "Unknown number. Local area code."

"Answer it," Rhys said. "If anyone gave a statement to police last night, it's your number on that report, not mine."

Emmett picked it up, one hand still on the wheel. "Hello?"

Ivy watched Rhys go very still in the seat beside her.

"Yeah, this is Emmett Voss. I called it in." A pause. "No, sorry, who is this again?"

Rhys's hand found Emmett's shoulder from the back seat, not gripping, just there, and Emmett's next sentence came out steadier for it.

"I reported an accident on Route 22," Emmett said into. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. "The ambulance took her. That's all I know."

He listened for several seconds, his mouth tightening.

"No, I don't have her name. You need to call Merrow County dispatch." Emmett ended the call and dropped the phone into the console. "He had my full name and the vehicle plate. He asked if the woman had short hair and a scar on her wrist."

“Did he say who he was?”

"No. But if he has my plate, he can pull the dispatch log by noon."

"He will have the hospital name by noon."

Rhys looked out the side window. "By noon she will be off their floor records."

Rhys's jaw worked once, and he didn't say anything else about it. Ivy filed that away with everything else she hadn't decided what to do with yet.

They didn't stop again until a two-story building with no sign out front, the glass tinted dark enough that she couldn't see her own reflection, let alone anyone inside.

The door opened before Rhys knocked, held by a man in plain clothes, no white coat, nothing that marked him as a doctor except how fast he reached for her wrist instead of introducing himself first.

"Pulse is fine," he said, mostly to Rhys. "Transfer paperwork says the same. I'll do a proper look in ten minutes, once she's sat still long enough for it to mean anything." He looked at Ivy directly for the first time. "Marsh. Sit down whenever you're ready. Nobody's rushing you today."

He checked her pupils, her pulse again, the cut along her hairline she hadn't noticed until his fingers found it, careful in a way that had nothing to do with fragility and everything to do with habit. He noted the old scarring at her wrist without asking about it, made a note, and moved on. He didn't ask about any of it out loud. When he finished, he set a glass of water on the table beside her without being asked.

She sat. Small room, one window facing a strip of side garden nobody had mowed in a while. Nothing about it should have been a relief. It was one anyway.

She spent the next while at the window instead of in the chair, watching a groundskeeper who never once looked up at the building move a hose from one bed to another, and a woman in scrubs cross the gravel lot twice for reasons Ivy couldn't guess at and didn't try to. Nobody in this place moved with the flinch of someone who knew they were being watched.

She didn't say any of that out loud. She hadn't said much of anything out loud since the one word in the hospital room, and nobody here seemed to be waiting on her to.

Marsh finished writing on the chart and looked up, not at her, at Rhys, standing by the door at the same distance he'd kept in the hospital room.

"She hasn't said a word."

"She wrote something at the hospital. Ten words."

"Ten words, in how many hours?"

Rhys didn't answer that.

Marsh looked back at Ivy, assessing her in a different way than the pupils and pulse had been, and whatever he decided, he kept it to himself. "Selective mutism isn't unusual after what her chart says she's been through. It's also not something anyone should try to talk her out of." He capped his pen. "Let her set the pace. Both of you."

Ivy watched them talk about her like she wasn't there. Normally that would have put her back up. It didn't, not this time, and she filed that away too, right next to everything else she hadn't decided what to do with yet.

"She can't stay here," Marsh said, quieter than before, not quite quiet enough to keep it from her. "A clinic gets visitors. A house doesn't, not without warning."

Rhys didn't argue. "Today, then."

"Somewhere with staff who already know how to mind their own business, ideally."

"That narrows it to one place."

Ivy didn't ask where. She'd stopped expecting to be told things before they happened, and started, cautiously, expecting to be shown instead, whenever showing finally got around to it.