After His Mistress Framed Me, My Parents Died

The supply run was supposed to take ten minutes. Gauze, saline, a box of sutures from Building C to Building A. I had the clipboard under one arm and a crate balanced on my hip when Ezra stepped out from the shade of the corridor like he'd been waiting there.

He had. I could tell by the way he didn't look surprised.

"Melany."

The dust was thick that morning, hanging gold in the early light. It settled on his shoes, on the cuffs of a shirt too clean for this place. I kept walking. He fell into step beside me, which I hadn't invited.

"I didn't know," he said. "That you were here. If I had known—"

"Hold this." I shoved the clipboard into his hands and crouched to set the crate down outside the storeroom door. I found the inventory sheet, signed it against my knee, the pen trembling slightly in my grip. He watched my hand. I saw him watch it. I didn't stop.

"Seeing you," he said, "it's—I haven't been able to—"

I took the clipboard back. "Colette's vitals are stable. Two fractured ribs, minor internal bruising, no active bleeding. Barring complications, she'll be cleared for discharge within the week."

"That's not what I—"

"That's the update you came for." I tucked the clipboard under my arm and picked the crate back up. "If anything changes, someone will find you."

I walked away before he could turn any of that into a sentence with my name at the start of it. Behind me, I heard him say something. I didn't catch the words. I didn't go back for them.

---

Dakota found him first, or maybe he found her. Either way, by the time I heard about it, the sun was already down and the generator lights were humming their low, insect buzz over the courtyard.

I wasn't there. She told me later, flat, over the top of a coffee cup, the way she told me everything that mattered.

He'd been standing near the supply trucks when she came out for a smoke she didn't actually want. She said he looked like a man who hadn't slept somewhere in the last several days and was pretending otherwise.

"What happened to her," he'd asked. No preamble. "After the trial. I need to know."

Dakota said she looked at him a long moment first. The hollow starting under his eyes. The way he held his jaw, braced, like a man waiting to be hit and hoping it would hurt.

"That's not my story to tell," she said.

He didn't push. She gave him credit for that, grudgingly, the way she gives anyone credit for anything.

"You have some nerve," she said, "showing your face here."

Not shouted. Not even sharp. Just true, the way a diagnosis is true.

He didn't argue. She said that surprised her.

"Is she alright?" he asked instead.

"She's alive," Dakota said. "That's more credit than you deserve for it."

Then she went back inside and left him standing there with the trucks and the dark and whatever it is he carries around now instead of certainty.

---

Colette did not do well with the ward.

I heard about that too, in pieces, mostly from Soren, who has a young man's inability to keep his face blank when something offends his sense of fairness.

She wrinkled her nose at the smell — antiseptic and dust and old blood that never quite leaves a field hospital no matter how many times you scrub it. She flinched from the man three beds down whose leg had been reconstructed out of pins and prayer. She called the night nurse "the woman" instead of Fadwa, though Fadwa's name was on a badge two inches from Colette's face.

She tried to press a folded bill into Fadwa's palm at the end of a shift. Fadwa didn't take it. Soren said the look on Colette's face when the money didn't land the way she expected was something he wouldn't forget — surprise, then something colder underneath the surprise.

At two in the morning, a child in the next bed started crying and didn't stop. A little boy, burns on both arms, calling for his mother in Arabic that Colette clearly didn't understand and didn't try to.

By morning she was demanding a private room.

Rami told her, in the mild, unhurried voice he uses on donors and generals alike, that there were no private rooms. That the hospital had eleven beds and forty patients some nights and this was, in fact, one of the better nights.

I wasn't there for that conversation either. But I imagined her face when he said no. I imagined it clearly, and for one second — one single, unguarded second, standing over a suture tray with my hand pressed flat against my thigh — I let myself feel something close to satisfaction.

Then I counted to three, picked up the needle, and went back to the boy with the burns, who needed me more than she ever would.