The hospital kept her until Sunday evening.
Tests, paperwork, the quiet efficient machinery of people who dealt with broken things and knew how to be matter-of-fact about it without being unkind. A nurse named Carol who had the particular gift of talking about difficult things in a normal voice. A doctor who explained what he needed to explain and didn't explain more than that. Leo sat in the waiting area for most of it, in a plastic chair beside a window that looked out over a car park, and drank bad coffee from a machine and kept his phone in his hand.
He called Lia at half past nine.
She answered on the first ring, which meant she'd been awake and waiting, which meant Rio had told her something.
"How is she," Lia said. No preamble.
"Stable." He'd learned that word from Dr. Reeves a
