THE PRICE OF ASH

The Note

Ivy woke to a ceiling that wasn't Hollow Pines'. She checked that before she checked anything else, including whether anything hurt.

A machine somewhere to her left made a sound at a steady interval, and there was a weight on the back of her hand that turned out to be tape, holding a line in place. No restraints on the wrists. No belt across the sheet. She catalogued both before she let herself relax. Not by much.

A woman came in without knocking, which nobody at Hollow Pines had ever done, checked the monitor, and looked at Ivy directly instead of at the chart first.

"You're at Merrow General. Car versus pedestrian, non-life-threatening, you've been out about six hours." She had a badge that read OKAFOR and the flat, unhurried voice of someone who'd delivered worse news than this and would again before her shift ended. "You came in without ID. Right now you're listed as unidentified."

Ivy's eyes went to her own wrist before she could stop them. Bare skin. A thin pale line where the band had sat for eleven months, and nothing else.

"That's not a problem tonight," Okafor went on. "In about forty hours it becomes one, because that's when the state starts treating an unidentified adult as a missing person and opens a file on it. If there's a name you want on your chart before then, now's the time to decide."

Ivy didn't answer.

Okafor didn't push. "Can you tell me your name?"

Ivy shook her head. Once.

"Can you, or won't you?"

Ivy held her gaze and didn't answer that either, and something in Okafor's face shifted, not sympathy exactly, closer to a quiet recalculation.

"There's a pad in the drawer if you'd rather write." Okafor nodded at the bedside table and left without waiting to see if she used it.

The room had one chair, and a man was sitting in it who hadn't been there when Okafor was.

She watched him before he said anything. She watched his hands, then the door behind him. Habit. The same way she watched Hollow Pines staff, except she couldn't yet tell what she was looking for. He hadn't pulled the chair any closer to the bed than it already was. He was dark-haired, tall enough that he'd had to duck slightly coming through the doorway, broad enough through the shoulders that the suit fit tight across them. His eyes were grey, and he was still in that suit with no tie, dressed for somewhere he clearly hadn't planned on leaving early.

He didn't ask how she felt. Every visitor at Hollow Pines had always asked that, whether or not they'd caused the thing they were asking about.

"I called it in," he said. "The accident. I was in the car."

Ivy watched him. She didn't reach for the pad yet.

"I don't know what happened to you," he said. "I don't know how you ended up in the middle of that road tonight, and I'm not going to guess out loud." He glanced toward the door Okafor had gone through. "But you heard her. Right now nobody official knows who you are. That's time. However you want to use it."

He took a card from his jacket and held it toward her.

She didn't reach for that either.

He set it on the blanket instead, near her hand, and drew his own back.

"Your bill's covered," he said. "Whatever the hospital wants for tonight. It's the least I can do, given I'm the reason you're here."

He stood, already turning toward the door.

She looked at the card. RHYS KADE, and under it, a company name she didn't recognize.

He was two steps from the door when she reached for the pad instead.

She wrote fast, before she could talk herself out of it.

How fast can you get me a new name?

He turned around, read it standing in the doorway, and didn't move.

"Why," he said. Not unkind. Just the question.

She didn't have an answer that would make sense to him. She wrote something else.

"Please."

Something moved behind his face that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with somewhere else. He didn't explain it. She didn't ask for one.

"Okay," he said. He came back into the room instead of leaving it. "Here's what I'm going to do. I can get you out of here. Somewhere farther out, for now. Somewhere whatever you're running from can't find you, at least not yet. When you're ready to talk, you tell me why."

She nodded, which was a lie, but a small one, and one she intended to make true within the next few minutes if it killed her.

"Get her moved somewhere Marsh can work without questions," Rhys said. "I don't need the details. Just get it done."

"Understood," Foster said, and the line went dead.

It was past three by the time Emmett found him in the corridor outside the nurses' station.

"You should go home," Emmett said. "Or a hotel, whatever's closer. There's nothing else for you to do here tonight."

Rhys knew he was right. There was nothing left to decide. Foster had it handled. The transfer would happen whether Rhys stood in this corridor or not, and coming back in six hours wouldn't change anything either.

He didn't move.

"Rhys."

"I heard you."

"You're not going, are you?"

"No."

Emmett didn't argue about it. "I'll get you a coffee, then. The machine two floors down actually works."

He came back ten minutes later with two coffees anyway, and didn't say anything about the fact that Rhys hadn't moved. He handed one over and took the other chair without being asked.

They didn't talk. The corridor emptied out and filled back in twice before Rhys's phone finally buzzed with the word he'd actually been waiting for.

Can't move her tonight. An overnight transfer request on an unidentified patient gets noticed by exactly the people you don't want noticing. Morning shift change, normal transfer volume, nobody looks twice.

Rhys read it twice.

"How long," he said, more to himself than to Emmett.

Rhys didn't like it. He said so once, low, to nobody in particular, and let it go, because there wasn't anything to argue with. The sun came up when it came up.