What are you doing, you fool? He’s none of your business anymore. You have half an hour to eat and get a little walk in the fresh air.
Ignoring the sensible part of my brain, I searched for Griffin’s name and “car accident.” Plenty of articles came up. The first ones were full of salacious guesses. Was he drunk? Was he high? Had he been livestreaming on social media, pandering for likes and followers as he killed someone? There were photos, too, of Griffin outside his arraignment and bail hearing looking shocked, his eyes blank in a shadowed face. I swiped past those.
Interest died down pretty quickly when Griffin was only charged with distracted driving and the drugs and drink angle went away. A bit of faux-outrage over a coverup replaced the drunk driving rants, but between a plea bargain and lowered charges, the media stopped caring. A couple of recent stories mentioned his sentencing. Since I was already being an icky stalker about this, I clicked on those too.
Griffin looked older in the most recent video, and he just said, “No comment,” to every question. Hearing his voice, even on video, started an uncomfortable echo in my chest and I clicked the sound off. The woman walking next to him seemed to be a lawyer. There’d been no mention of his family or a partner in any of the stories. The last thing posted was video of him trudging into an apartment building, a reporter shouting questions at his averted face. Nothing from Wellhaven today. If any of the staff had filmed his singing, the videos hadn’t gone viral.
Yet.
Well.
I closed the search window. Not my circus. Not my monkey.
I’d made it without thinking about Griffin more than occasionally in the last nineteen years. I was nothing like the young twink he’d dated once upon a time. I felt sorry for the woman who died, sorry for Griffin whose crime fell underthere, but for the grace of God, go I. But in however many months it would take for him to work off his sentence, he’d leave Wellhaven and go back to the concert circuit. He’d be fine. I wished him well.
Lunch.I’d brought a sandwich. I could eat at my desk and work, make some progress. Walking was overrated anyway.
Sandwich in hand, I pulled up the medical record I’d abandoned and decided that everything pointed to hyperthyroid, based on her clinical signs. I put the appropriate note in the patient’s problem list with an asterisk just in case. In that case, I should run across Iodine 131 treatment at some point in confirmation. I swiped on to page thirty-one. I was a professional with a job to do and no time to get maudlin about the past.
Chapter 3
Griffin
Without my guitar, the other bus riders didn’t pay me much attention— a weekday morning crowd whose heading-to-work, wish-I-drank-more-coffee expressions matched mine. We avoided each other’s gazes. I missed my car, or rather my right to drive it, but at the same time, I didn’t miss the new nauseous swoop in my gut every time I’d gotten behind the wheel. The chicken part of me that’d had to be forced to drive again after the accident through sheer willpower was relieved to sit back and let someone else do the job.
How I’d feel about that come winter might be a different story. No more than I deserved, of course.
The bus let me off in front of the nursing home. I guess a bus stop right there made sense. As I turned in at the front walk, a familiar guy with a camera sprang out from the bushes by the entrance doors and shoved the lens in my face. “Griffin Marsh, you gave an unexpected performance for Wellhaven residents yesterday. Are you playing again today? Do you think it’s fair to your paying fans to offer free concerts they can’t go to?”
I managed to keepWhat the actual fuck?off my lips. Never respond to press provocation, they will always twist it. I wanted to say, “If those fans develop health problems bad enough toland them in Wellhaven, they can listen too,” but that would be far too easy to make into a nasty soundbite.
Instead, I said, “I’m not singing today.” I figured that was important to get out, so the nursing home wouldn’t have to cope with stray groupies showing up. Not that I had actual groupies these days, but I still had some fans. “If I play and sing again for the folks who live here, it will be rarely and unannounced.”
“Didn’t the judge sentence you to hundreds of hours of community service? How does that fit with only rare performances? Isn’t that a violation of your sentence?”
You think the only thing I can do for someone is sing to them?To be honest, I’d lived alone for so long, that wasn’t far off the mark, but I was determined to make myself useful in other ways. “No comment.” I stepped around him and headed into the building. He followed me back up the walk asking more inanities but didn’t come past the doors, turning away with his phone in hand, thumbs busy. I guess I wasn’t important or responsive enough to waste more time on.Good. Maybe he’ll quit dogging me.
I reached the lobby through the code-locked double doors and looked around. The common room space was big enough for a group, with chairs scattered around, but could’ve used more natural light. A grand piano sat in the far corner. I’d noticed a faint layer of dust on the keyboard when I’d sat on the bench to play guitar yesterday. Maybe I could do a little piano music sometimes. It wasn’t my best instrument, but I knew enough to offer up some old favorites for these folks.
Today, though, I was hunting for the entertainment director. She’d said she would find work for me to fill my morning. I liked Kashira. She’d seemed like a force of nature, full of energy, rounding up folks to haul chairs into an impromptu concertaudience and herding the residents into them kindly but firmly, pushing wheelchairs into the gaps with a little flourish. She’d grinned brilliantly yesterday when she’d had my twenty or so elderly spectators seated.
This morning, a few residents sat or dozed in the armchairs dotting the lobby space. One of them waved to me as I crossed the room, but the others seemed oblivious or unimpressed.
You’re really not that special, Marsh.I waved at the elderly woman in return, then headed down the first-floor hallway. As I passed a couple of open doors, hesitating at each one, I realized I was bracing for a sight of Lee.
If that was Lee yesterday.
Twenty years had passed since I’d driven away while he yelled at me from the sidewalk. Lee had been a lean, angular young guy then, still growing into his frame, cleanshaven with a head of red curls he despaired of and I loved. Liked. Whatever.
The man I’d glimpsed yesterday was a bear of a guy, or at least a cub. Bulky and padded, with strong arms and half his face hidden by a full beard. Nothing like the Lee I remembered. But when our eyes met across that room, my recognition had been visceral, a jolt right down to my core.Lee Robertson.I’d stared into those eyes, kissed the tip of that nose. His full mouth might’ve been framed by a new auburn beard, but my lips remembered his.
I’d stuttered, lost a note, and glanced down. When I looked back up, the guy was gone.
After I’d finished playing, I’d chickened out on asking Kashira. That would lead to questions I had zero desire to answer. The big man had been in scrubs, meaning he worked here, so if it was Lee—I know it was— we’d no doubt run into each other at somepoint. Then I’d find out if he wanted to punch me, hug me, or act like he couldn’t quite remember my name. Any and all of those were possible.
And what do I want?I shoved that question away. I was the one who’d left, chasing a dream that had me on the road for the next two decades. If we ended up back face-to-face now, Lee would be the one calling the shots.
Kashira turned my way from her desk when I knocked on her open door. “Right on time. Come on in and let me punch your timeclock.” She clicked through computer screens as I sat in the chair across from her. “Why do people call it ‘punch’ anyhow? Like, they got mad at the clock?”
