Chapter 18

On my lunch break the next day, I didn’t go to the hospital cafeteria. I went to the ER. There was a vending machine near intake, which was as close as I could get to the pit without drawing attention.

I needed to find a way past the double doors. I needed to talk to someone in trauma. And somehow, I needed to find a way to steal and smuggle out a healthy supply of Lactated Ringer’s, an entire course of intravenous antibiotics, and, if I could manage it, some morphine.

The fact that I was even there, the fact that I was even considering throwing my life away like this—for him—was unfathomable, but it was either that or admit that Jackson and I were in over our heads. I couldn’t see any other way out that didn’t end with bloodshed.

I hadn’t been able to save Kaylie, but I could do this. I had to do this.

I was on my third pack of vending machine Oreos when my supervisor sat down in the chair next to me in the waiting room.

“Did someone call you?” I asked her.

That got me a look. “Do you think I need someone to tell me what’s going on in my own hospital?”

Most of the doctors who worked here probably would have objected to the suggestion that this hospital belonged to a single nurse from oncology, but I was smart enough not to argue.

“You going to tell me why you’re lurking down here?” she said.

I looked toward the doors I hadn’t yet pushed my way past.

“Thinking about emergency medicine for your next rotation?” my supervisor guessed bluntly. “Trauma?” She paused. “Maybe the burn unit?”

She doesn’t know. A breath caught in my throat. She can’t.

“You couldn’t have saved her, Hannah.”

Her. I realized that she thought that this was about my sister, about my grief.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But maybe I could save someone like her.” I swallowed, then covered. “Next time.”

My supervisor considered that. “As it happens,” she said finally, “someone in the burn unit owes me a favor.”

Of everything I learned visiting the burn unit that day, the information that hit me the hardest was that the most painful time for most burn patients was when their dressings were being changed. I thought about Harry telling me he felt like he was being flayed alive, and then I thought about all the other times I’d changed his dressings, the times when his eyes had locked on to mine while I’d worked and he hadn’t said a word.

That night, I stayed at Jackson’s and did what I could. Instead of sleeping, I stayed up for hours, working to unfold that damn paper cube. I wondered how often Harry had seen me folding. It was like the sugar castles all over again, like he wanted me to know that there was no such thing as me fading into the background with him.

Finally, I did it, managing to undo each and every fold without tearing the paper at all. In the very center of the page, Harry had written four words in oversized, uneven scrawl:

EVERYTHING HURTS. DOESN’T IT?

I left for the hospital early the next day. This is a mistake. It didn’t matter. I was committed.

Near the end of my shift, I managed to catch the door to the third-floor pharmacy with my foot before it locked. Morphine wasn’t accessible, but I took the antibiotics and the IV solution. I’m going to get caught. And even if I don’t—neither of these will do a thing about the pain.

As I tucked the stolen goods into my bag, I thought about “A Poison Tree.” I thought about that tiny, intricate paper cube. I thought about the way my patient tossed and turned in his sleep, his agony obviously getting worse.

And then, on the way out to my car, once it had become clear that I wasn’t going to get caught—not that night, at any rate—I thought about the other place I could go to get drugs. Not morphine but an opioid all the same.

Oxy.