“So how’ve you been? Still living in town?”

“Nah. Just work there. I live a few miles from Bailey. Nice area. You know.”

He was acting like I had a clue about Bailey. I didn’t know where she lived or what she did. Didn’t want to ask around, to draw attention to the uncomfortable truth: Bailey and I didn’t speak. Not after Corinne had disappeared. Hardly ever a day since.

That box in the police station, it does things to people. Makes you tell things about each other. Becomes a permanent record of your betrayal, with your signature below.

“Well,” I said, “it was really good seeing you, Mark.”

I was almost at the door when he called after me. “Hey, Nic,” he said, using some voice I’d never heard from him. His cop voice. “You in town for a while?”

I shrugged. “Just taking care of some loose ends.” I gripped the papers tighter to keep my hands from shaking.

He didn’t ask why I was here or who I was visiting.

He already knew.

As soon as the doors shut behind me, I raced to my father’s room.

* * *

DAD WAS PARTICULARLY DISORIENTED, or rattled, or both.

He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall, faintly rocking back and forth. I knocked on the open door, but he didn’t answer. “Dad?” I called. He turned to look at me, then went back to the wall and the rocking. He was shutting down.

There was no imminent danger. No reason for the director to call Daniel or schedule a meeting or explain her concerns. They were probably quite pleased with themselves.

But for me, this was scarier. He wasn’t clawing for sanity, or fighting for understanding, or raging against the unfamiliar. He was letting go.

On the wall across from the bed were pictures of us, of me and Daniel and the nurses and doctors, people he shouldn’t be afraid of. People he should remember. He was staring right through them now. I stood beside my picture. My hair was shorter in it, and I was smiling, and Dad had his arm slung over my shoulder. It was from when we brought him here last year, taken in this very room, because we couldn’t find any recent photos of the two of us. With daughter, Nic, it said underneath in Daniel’s handwriting.

Dad kept rocking. He was mumbling something—repeating words to himself, all strung together in nonsense. “Dad,” I tried again, but he still looked right through me.

Then he stopped, paused, focused. “Shana?” he asked.

I closed my eyes, and he went back to rocking.

There was no picture of my mother on the walls. It had been a hard decision, the one Daniel and I wavered over the most—whether to put her up there and fill him with the hope that she still existed. Or whether to pretend she never did. Which was worse? Daniel and I debated it over dinner the night before we moved him in. I was the one who made the decision, because I knew: The losing. The losing of something you thought you had. That was far, far worse.

I stepped into the hallway, the light too bright, the buzzing from the fluorescence drowning out the low hum of voices in the other rooms. “Hey,” I said to the first official-looking person walking down the hall. No scrubs, business casual, hair loose, and a birdlike face. I recognized her from the last time I was here. I grabbed her arm as she tried to walk past with a stiff smile. “What did you do to him?” I asked.

Maybe it was the way I grabbed her arm, or maybe the look in my eye, but she blinked slowly and said, “I’ll page the doctor.”

“No. I want to speak with Karen Addelson,” I said firmly, trying to summon my best impression of Everett, calling the director by her full name.

“She’s in a meeting.”

If Everett were here, he’d have her pulled out of that meeting without it seeming like his idea. He’d let this woman talk herself in circles: She shouldn’t be long; oh, I see the problem here; well, maybe I’ll just peek my head in, see if she can spare a moment. Make it seem like her idea all along.

“I need to talk to her,” I said.

“I’ll let her know as soon as she’s done.”

“Now,” I said. “I need to talk to her now. Has someone been to see my dad? Is that why he’s silently rocking back and forth on his bed right now? Is this what you all mean by”—I raised my hands in makeshift quotes—“exceptional patient care?”

Her cheeks flushed. “Fine. You can sit in the waiting room. I’ll tell her you’re here.”

I followed her determined steps down the hall. “Why were the police here?” I asked.

Her step faltered, but she kept moving. “I don’t know. The cops showed up an hour ago—”

“Cops or cop?” I asked. “Mark Stewart?”

She paused at the office door, turned to me with a quizzical look. “One cop.” She cleared her throat. “Asian, I think?” She blushed again, like that wasn’t the PC way to describe someone.

Just a guy. Just a goofy, sullen kid. Mark.

“And you let him talk to my dad? I will hold you all personally accountable if this”—I made an arm movement trying to encompass everything my dad was at the moment—“gets worse.”

She gestured toward the couch, then sat at the desk in the outer office. “I was in here. I have no idea what happened.” She picked up the phone and pressed a button. “I have Patrick Farrell’s daughter in the waiting room.”

Karen Addelson was outside her office, escorting a couple and making apologies for the interruption, within a solid minute. The director held out her hands. “Nicolette. Please, come in.” As if she’d been expecting me.

Her office had potted plants and a little Zen garden on a coffee table, a miniature rake with lazy curving lines through the sand. “What did you do to my dad? I saw Officer Stewart in the parking lot, and my dad is practically catatonic in his room. What the hell happened?”

“Sit, please,” she said.

I sat in the straight-back chair in front of her desk, ignoring the couch she was gesturing toward. Tough to feel self-righteous when you’re stuffed into an oversize couch in front of a Zen garden.

She took her time walking to the other side of the desk. When she sat, she folded her hands on top of the desk blotter, the blue veins running over her knuckles, making her look about ten years older than I’d originally thought. Sixties. Dad’s age. God, he shouldn’t be here.

“Ms. Farrell,” she began, “I cannot stop the police from questioning a patient, as much as I wish that weren’t the case. It was just a few questions. Apparently, your father might’ve been a potential witness to a crime.”