Chapter 17: Terms for Tomorrow

Evan did not sleep. At two he gave up pretending and took the shift-handoff notebook to the kitchen table. Lists were what he did with fear. He ruled the page into four headings, Medical, Emergency, Household and Other, and the pen wrote something across the top instead. Did she let me leave because she trusted me, or because she could not stop me? He looked at it until the refrigerator cycled twice. She had stepped back from the door and left him a clear path, and he had taken it. She had told him she could change what he remembered. She had told him she hadn't. Both sentences were hers, and neither proved anything except that she'd said them. Around four he saw what the question was doing. People who were never going back did not rank their questions by urgency at four in the morning. The question was already…