Page 58 of Go First

“No,” Kate said.

Winters’s eyebrows lifted a millimeter.“I said ‘disagree’, not ‘interrupt’.”

“I’m interrupting because I don’t want to make a speech,” Kate said.“I won’t duck out.And not because of loyalty to Marcus,” she added, before Winters could load that bullet.“Though I owe him plenty.If anything, the fact that he’s… here”—she tilted her head, meaning the floor above their heads and the tubes and the beeping—“makes me more adamant.I want Cox brought back to jail, and buried there.Then I want the world to stop.”

Winters’s gaze stayed on her for a long, quiet moment.When she finally spoke, the steel came wrapped in velvet.

“I am going to ignore that answer,” she said.“And give you a week to think it over.That’s my offer.Seven days.No heroics.No grandstanding.Just a major, career-changing decision given the full weight of your attention.”She leaned back a fraction.“Don’t make this a reflex.Don’t make it about me, or Marcus, or your need to be the one who solves it all.Make it about your life.You actually do really only get one.”

Kate looked down at her cup.The coffee had developed a skin.She set it aside.

“Okay,” she said.“A week.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” Winters said, which in her vocabulary meant: I will hold myself to holding you.

They stood.Winters smoothed an invisible wrinkle out of her jacket.

“You going up?”Kate asked.

“In a minute,” Winters said.Her voice was neutral; her eyes were somewhere else.“I’ll be along.”

Kate left her there with the bad coffee and the dusty plant, walking back to 412 with two paper cups balanced in the cradle of her good hand.A volunteer pushed a library cart of paperbacks with faded spines.Kate couldn’t remember the last time she’d read anything that didn’t include graphs or units per fluid-ounce.Just for a moment, the notion of an easy job, the haven of a desk and paperwork, seemed quite attractive.

Just for a moment.

Cheryl looked up as Kate slid into the room.

“Milky and moral,” Kate said, passing the cup.

“Perfect,” Cheryl said, and wrapped both hands around it.

They drank for a while, the way people drink when the drinking is not the point.And they fell into silence again, one of those good ones that didn’t require anyone to do tricks.

The machine at Marcus’s shoulder clicked, a sound it had been making all morning.Now it sounded like it meant something else.Very slightly, his right hand moved under the sheet.Not a gesture.The hint of one.

Cheryl froze.Kate set her coffee down too fast and blamed the splash on the cup lid.

“Hey, babe,” Cheryl said, leaning in, voice suddenly steady.“Hey.It’s Cheryl.You’re safe.No moving.No jokes.Just… stay.”

Marcus’s eyelids gave a small, irritated twitch, the same one he deployed when a witness started a story three centuries too early.The breath under his ribs changed rhythm, not faster, not slower—more…his.

Kate felt something she had kept folded for seven days unfold a little.She put two fingers on the rail to keep herself from touching him.

“Marcus,” she said, softly.“It’s Vee.Get up, will you?”

She didn’t know why she said that.But Cheryl’s laugh broke into a sob, and that set Kate off, too.

So they were crying and laughing together when door opened.A young neurology resident in a superhero scrub cap slid in, checked the levels, the pupils, the numbers, and made a pleased noise that suggested med school had not entirely eliminated her joy.

“We’re getting there,” she said, and scribbled on a chart.“But it’s going to be slow, ladies,” she added.“And sometimes things may go back, as well as forwards.”

“That sounded like a disclaimer,” Kate said.

They watched Marcus breathe.Outside, a siren wound down into a sigh.The tree in the parking lot stirred.

Cheryl set her cup down carefully, then wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.“Thank you,” she said, not looking at Kate.“For earlier.”

“You’re welcome,” Kate said.She reached into her pocket for a tissue and found instead a folded scrap of paper on which she’d written ‘seven days’.Winters’s week.