I’m sure it’s not a universal opinion, but I consider visiting a hospital as one of those things best avoided by anyone with even a touch of spiritual awareness. While it’s undoubtedly worse in places like prisons and war zones, you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in civilian life where there is so much concentrated pain, suffering, and unhappiness. Even worse, most hospitals stay open for decades. So all of that misery seeps into the walls, the floors, the very atmosphere of the place, and there’s little to nothing that anyone can do to disperse it. It just sits there, building up, layer on layer, like some kind of malevolent pearl in a concrete oyster shell. Knowing that, I find every story talking about old hospitals being haunted absolutely plausible unless given good reason to doubt it. What I find incredible is that so few hospitals become portals to unspeakable netherplaces. I was so perplexed about the why of it that I even asked Gran about it once.

She just shrugged and said, “Sometimes, lad, the universe does a kind thing.”

Still, it doesn’t make walking into a place like that any easier. You feel the pressure bearing down on you like an anchor tied to your heart. It makes you want to scream, cry, fight, and fall into a state of pure apathy all at the same time. Even so, there are some things you can’t avoid doing from time to time. Going to hospitals is just one of those things. So, after I parked, I spent a few minutes girding my loins before I walked inside. It took a while to work through the bureaucracy, but I was eventually pointed to the right floor.

I found Gabriella sitting by herself in a little nook that I’d hesitate to call a waiting area. It was just a couple of chairs around a tiny table that was dominated by a plant that I didn’t recognize. A narrow slit of a window apparently let in enough light to keep the plant alive, although I’m not sure how. Gabriella was staring out that wafer of glass with such a look of dread on her face that I didn’t even have to wonder what she was thinking about. A part of me desperately wanted to turn around and leave. I didn’t want to talk to her about what had happened to her or what I’d done about it. It wasn’t even that I minded her knowing about it, so much as I didn’t want to tell her about it. I worried that she’d have questions. The same questions that had burned in everyone’s eyes back at Gran’s. The kind of question that people both want and don’t want to ask. In the end, it was the incoming threat of Pierce Carter that made the decision for me. I couldn’t put this off.

I swallowed hard and said, “Gabriella.”

She spun around in her seat, eyes wild and breathing too fast, before she recognized me. Relief washed over her in a visible shudder. Then, she did something I really hadn’t seen coming. She lurched out of the chair and almost hurled herself at me. Her arms wrapped around me hard enough that I was worried she might hurt herself.

“I was so afraid for you,” she said into my shoulder.

My brain stuttered a bit on that one. Afraid for me? I put an arm around her and patted her back.

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“Why were you worried about me?” I asked, genuinely baffled.

She pulled back and gave me a look that said, in no uncertain terms, that I had been dropped on my head as a small child. Then, she hit me on the chest. “Why was I worried? Because you didn’t come back.”

I’m not sure if it was my Y-chromosome slowing me down or what, but I really had to think it through to understand what the hell she was on about. From my point of view, the whole encounter with George had included some minor level of risk but was mostly a forgone conclusion. I’d already beaten him up once, and he hadn’t had enough time to take a level in badass. There wasn’t that much to worry about. As I took in Gabriella’s black eye, bruises, and swollen lip, though, the picture finally took on some clarity. For me, George was an insect. For Gabriella, George was a figure of terror and violence. It had probably seemed all too reasonable to her that the brutish asshat had done something terrible to me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m fine.”

That dropped on your head as a baby expression flitted across her face again, but she just shook her head. “What happened?”

There it was. The question. That inevitable question that I’d thought about the whole drive over. I’d considered just telling her the whole truth but ultimately decided against it. That wasn’t her burden to carry. In the end, she just didn’t need to know the details. They wouldn’t help her.

“George won’t bother you again,” I said.

Gabriella went very still at those words. I could almost see all of the questions swirling around in her brain. She wanted to ask. She really wanted to ask. I just waited to see where she’d come down on the curiosity vs. pragmatism spectrum. She came down somewhere in the middle.

“You’re sure?”

I nodded and said, “I’m absolutely certain of it.”

Some part of me thought that she would ask me more about it, but she didn’t. Gabriella just pressed her face into my shirt and sobbed. I worried that it would look super awkward if anyone walked by and saw me standing with my arms at my side while she cried. So, I put my arms around her and just let her get it out of her system. It took a while. I don’t know exactly how long, but it sure felt like it took eight or nine thousand years. She eventually let go of me and pulled a tissue from somewhere.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

That made me wish that she had asked me some of those questions that I didn’t feel like answering. I had no idea what someone was supposed to say to something like that. What could I say? Saying something like, “you’re welcome,” seemed wildly inappropriate. I still hadn’t come up with anything that seemed like it fit, so I was almost grateful when someone spoke from behind me.

“Who are you?”

I knew that whoever said it was going to be a problem. They’d spoken in one of those tones. You know them when you hear them. They’re tones that expect an answer. They’re the kind of tones that only certain kinds of people use. I looked over my shoulder and saw more or less what I expected to see. It was a cop. Okay, I didn’t know for sure that he was a cop, but he looked like a cop. He wore a cheap suit and sported a mustache that didn’t do him any favors. Of course, that was true of a lot of middle-aged men. What screamed cop was the world-weary, suspicious look he shot me with his watery brown eyes. I didn’t intersect with cops very often, by design, but it seemed like they were always like this. Everyone was a criminal until proven innocent. The part of me that was irrationally angry at authority figures wanted to tell the guy to fuck off, but Gabriella saved me from myself.

She grabbed my hand and said, “This is Jericho, my boyfriend.”

Oh no, I thought.