Chapter 2

For a week, I volunteered for every pediatric shift the housekeeping supervisor would give me. The pediatric wing at Locke Medical smelled like antiseptic and vanilla from the air fresheners parents brought from home. Most of the kids were here for rehabilitation-spinal injuries, brain injuries, weeks or months of therapy. The transplant unit was somewhere else, down a hallway I wasn’t allowed to clean. But pediatric was close enough.

I learned the nurses’ rhythms. I learned which ones noticed me and which ones didn’t. I learned that the night shift ran on coffee and quiet, and that the charge nurse, a broad-shouldered woman named Marisol, saw everything.

On my fourth night in the wing, I met the boy.

He was in room 412, the corner room with the wide window facing the mountain. I was emptying the recycling when I heard him coughing-a wet, rattling sound that made my chest tighten. I stopped in the doorway without thinking. A nurse was already there, checking his oxygen, murmuring something soft.

The boy was small, maybe twelve or thirteen, with sandy brown hair and freckles and brown eyes that looked too old for his face. A medical alert bracelet glinted on his wrist. When the nurse left, he saw me watching.

“You’re new,” he said.

“Housekeeping,” I said. “I can come back.”

“No.” He picked at his blanket. “It’s boring at night. Do you clean rooms in the dark?”

“Sometimes.”

He smiled. It was a small smile, careful with his energy. I told myself I should leave. I had a cart, a schedule, a cover to protect. But I stepped inside.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Leo.”

The same name I’d seen on the crayon drawing. No-I hadn’t seen a name. I’d seen initials. E.V.

“What grade are you in, Leo?”

“Seventh. When I’m not in here.” He lifted his wrist and showed me the bracelet. It was engraved, but I couldn’t read it from that distance. “I got a new heart last year.”

I felt the air leave the room. My own heart pounded so hard I could hear it in my ears.

“That’s-that’s amazing,” I managed.

“Yeah.” He looked out the window. “I don’t know whose it was. My dad won’t tell me. He says it’s complicated.”

“Your dad?”

“Damian Locke.”

The name landed like a shovel hitting frozen ground. Damian Locke was not the recipient. Damian Locke’s son was. The boy with the freckles and the careful smile had my husband’s heart beating inside his chest.

I stood there holding a recycling bag and feeling the world rearrange itself. For fourteen months, I had aimed my grief like a rifle at Damian Locke. I had imagined him in an operating room, receiving Elias’s heart through corruption and money and power. I had hated him with a purity that kept me upright.

But the heart was in a child.

Leo coughed again and pressed a hand to his chest. “Sometimes it feels weird,” he said. “Like it knows something I don’t.”

I should have quit that night. I should have walked out of Locke Medical and never looked back. But I couldn’t. Because if Damian Locke had known about the heart, if he had been paying my mortgage the way the anonymous bank alerts suggested, then he was hiding something bigger than I had imagined.

And I needed to know what.