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“ W here the hell have you been?” Albert bellows, crashing through the front door of the hospital just as Eddie arrives. “And where the hell do you think you’re going?”

Albert’s tunic has wrinkled, and the lines on his face seem deeper than they did this morning. He looks like a man who has been grinding his teeth all day, a bald, bejeweled ball of freewheeling anxiety who’s lost all sense of time and gravity, ceding them to worry while flitting from hallway to hallway in the hospital, searching, waiting, for information that never came. He looks terrible.

“I was going up to see Cookie,” Eddie says.

“It’s after eight, you idiot. No visitors after eight.”

Eddie’s shoulders slump, so low that he almost loses his tote bag. “Oh,” he says, dejected.

“I repeat,” Albert says. “Where the hell have you been?”

Eddie reaches into his bag and holds up the photographs he took. “I thought Cookie might like these,” he says. “She’s always asking for pictures.”

Albert swipes them out of Eddie’s hand and shuffles through them like cards. “These are shit,” he says. “A bunch of boring buildings. What’s the point?”

“Those are the places you mentioned earlier,” Eddie says. “See? This is the old Copacabana building, and this one here is Mr Chow, and—”

“I repeat,” Albert says, handing them back to Eddie. “These are shit.”

“How is she?”

“She’s out of the ICU,” Albert says. “They’ve moved her into a regular bed. If she’s stable in the morning, we can take her home.”

“Already? Shouldn’t she stay here for a few days, just in case?”

“Just in case what? If she’s better, she’s better! And she hates this place just as much as I do.”

“I know, but—” Eddie thinks back to Sunset Ridge, about the oldest residents there, about how fragile they are. He can’t imagine the medical center ever discharging a patient Cookie’s age so quickly. “Does the doctor agree?”

“Look, Eddie. No one can force you to stay in a hospital. It’s not a prison. If she wants to leave in the morning, we are signing her out, whatever the doctor’s recommendations happen to be. I want her to be at home when—” Albert stops short. He inhales sharply.

“When what?”

It takes a moment for Albert to answer.

“When she gets better,” he says.