Chapter 2 - The Hours They Lost Her
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The ambulance doors closed before Declan could get inside.
Jamie held him back with one hand flat against his chest.
Declan looked at that hand as if he did not understand it.
The siren started.
The street emptied behind it.
For three seconds, he stood in the sleet with Sophia's blood on his shirt.
Then he got into the waiting car and told the driver to follow.
He did not remember giving the order.
He remembered her bag still hooked over his shoulder.
He remembered her keys cutting into his palm because he was holding them too tightly.
At the hospital, a nurse asked for her full name.
He gave it without hesitation.
Sophia Reyes.
Thirty two.
No husband.
No children.
Her father was dead.
Her mother lived in Arizona and had not spoken to her in four years.
He knew all of it and had never realized he knew all of it.
The nurse asked how he knew her.
He said she made his suits.
The nurse glanced at the blood on his cuffs and wrote something down.
They took her through double doors that did not stay open long enough.
A doctor in scrubs told him the bullet had passed beneath her right shoulder.
He said it had nicked an artery.
He said that word the way men say it when they are trying to be precise and kind at the same time.
Nicked.
As if it were small.
As if small could not kill a person in minutes.
Declan asked what they needed.
The doctor said surgery.
He said they needed time and blood and luck.
Declan rolled up his sleeve before the sentence had finished.
His blood type was not a match.
He stood there with his arm exposed and useless while a nurse gently pushed his sleeve back down.
Jamie arrived twenty minutes later with a clean shirt.
Declan did not take it.
Jamie set it over the back of a plastic chair and sat down beside him in the waiting room.
He brought coffee.
Declan did not drink it.
He brought a sandwich in a paper wrapper.
Declan did not look at it.
Outside the windows, the sleet turned to thin rain.
Inside, the clock above the desk moved with insulting slowness.
At midnight, a surgeon came out with his mask pulled down around his neck.
Declan stood so quickly that the chair scraped.
The surgeon said they had repaired the artery.
He said she had lost a great deal of blood before they got control of it.
He said there had been a period during surgery when her pulse had disappeared.
Declan heard the words from a distance.
He asked how long.
The surgeon hesitated.
Long enough, he said, that they had prepared to call it.
Jamie closed his eyes.
Declan did not move.
He asked what had brought her back.
The surgeon said her heart had simply decided to start again.
He said it as if that were a medical explanation.
He said the next hours would decide whether there had been any damage they could not yet see.
Declan asked if he could sit with her.
The surgeon looked at the blood still drying on his shirt.
He said family only.
Declan said nothing.
Jamie stepped forward and spoke quietly for less than a minute.
No one repeated what was said.
Five minutes later, a nurse led Declan down a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and warm plastic.
She pointed to a chair beside a bed in intensive care.
She told him not to touch the lines.
She told him to call if the monitor changed.
Then she left him alone with the sound of the machine doing the breathing Sophia could not yet do on her own.
Her face had no color.
Her hair was damp and pushed back from her forehead.
There was a bandage high on her chest beneath the hospital gown.
There was tape at her mouth and a bruise already darkening along her jaw where she had struck the pavement.
Declan sat down slowly in the chair that was too small for his frame.
He did not touch the lines.
He took only her left hand, carefully, where there was no needle.
Her fingers were cold.
He held them between both of his and tried to warm them the way a person warms something fragile.
He had held a gun more times than he could count.
He had never been afraid of his own hands before.
Now he was afraid he would hold too tightly.
He was afraid he would let go.
Jamie came in once with water.
He set it down and left without speaking.
Jamie came in again at two in the morning and told him to eat something.
Declan shook his head.
Jamie said starving would not repair an artery.
Declan did not answer.
Jamie pulled the other chair close and sat down anyway.
He had known Declan since they were nine years old and stealing plums from a yard on Callahan Street.
He had seen him after his father died.
He had seen him after the first man Declan ordered buried.
He had never seen him like this.
After a long silence, Jamie said the car had been found three blocks from the shop.
Declan lifted his head.
He said not now.
Jamie nodded and said nothing more about it.
The investigation could wait in the hallway.
Inside this room, there was only the monitor and the waiting.
At three, a nurse adjusted the drip and checked the dressing.
She told Declan her pressure was holding.
He asked what holding meant.
She said it meant they were not losing her at this moment.
He thanked her as if she had given him something personal.
When she left, he bowed his head over Sophia's hand.
He thought about the first time he had walked into Reyes Tailoring.
It had been two years ago on a wet Tuesday in March.
His previous tailor had retired to Florida without warning.
Jamie had found the shop on Wexford Street and said the woman there did work no one else in the city could match.
Declan had expected someone older.
He had expected a man.
Instead, Sophia had looked up from behind the counter with pins between her teeth and told him he was late.
His appointment had been for ten.
It was ten oh four.
He had stared at her.
No one had spoken to him that way in a decade without consequences.
She removed the pins and said his posture was ruining every suit he owned.
She said he stood as if he expected the floor to argue with him.
Then she told him to take off his jacket.
He obeyed before he decided to.
She measured him without flattery and without fear.
She told him his left shoulder sat higher than his right.
She told him a good suit should not hide that but work with it.
She asked who had cut his trousers.
He named a shop on Fifth.
She made a sound that required no translation.
That afternoon, she refused to sell him the cloth he wanted.
She said the blue was wrong for his coloring and would make him look tired in photographs.
He bought the gray she chose instead.
Three weeks later, strangers complimented a suit he had not thought about at all.
He went back the following month.
He went back the month after that.
Soon there was a standing appointment he told himself was practical.
He told himself the shop was quiet.
He told himself she did not ask questions that other people asked.
All of it was true.
None of it was the whole truth.
The whole truth was that in her shop, for an hour at a time, no one needed him to be Declan Callahan.
He was only a man whose hem she would not raise half an inch no matter how he argued.
Sitting in intensive care, he understood how much he had taken from those hours without ever naming them.
He had taken her steadiness.
He had taken her refusal to be impressed.
He had taken the sound of her moving around him with chalk and tape while the street went on outside.
He had brought his world with him every single time.
He had brought the car that followed at a distance.
He had brought the men who waited.
He had brought the danger that eventually stepped around a corner with headlights too bright and too fast.
Sophia had slipped on ice in a city she had lived in all her life.
She had fallen into a bullet that had never carried her name.
Declan pressed his forehead against their joined hands.
He whispered her name once, so quietly that even he barely heard it.
The monitor kept its steady count.
At four seventeen in the morning, the rhythm on the screen changed.
The numbers fell.
An alarm began, soft at first and then insistent.
Declan stood before he knew he was standing.
Nurses came through the door at a run.
Someone moved him back against the wall.
Someone else called for the doctor by name.
He watched their hands move over her with practiced urgency.
May you like
He watched the line on the monitor stutter.
He heard a voice say they were losing her again.
