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We had a uniformed officer on the door. I’d have liked to fetch some of my guns from the hotel safe, but wasn’t sure how the other marshals would feel about me carrying when I was supposed to be under review. I felt naked without a weapon, but I’d flashed the badge and I had to abide by that. It also meant that the other bodyguards Jean-Claude would have sent to me couldn’t come in either. None of them had badges, and some of them had records.

The door opened, and I tensed, my free hand going for a gun that wasn’t there. Damn. But it wasn’t a bad guy, it was a wheelchair being pushed by a nurse. In the wheelchair was Frank Schuyler, Jason’s dad. He had tubes up his nose and an oxygen tank on the back of the chair, and two different IV drips, but he was here.

The nurse said, “I told you he won’t wake up until morning, Mr. Schuyler.”

“I had to see him,” he said in that deep voice that Jason would never have, and then he looked at me with those cavernous dark eyes. It wasn’t exactly a friendly look, more intense. Like so many people when they get whittled down by a disease, he was pared down to nerve endings, emotions, demands. It was there in his eyes, angry eyes—no, rage-filled. Angry at his body, maybe? Or angry in general. Whatever the cause, I was okay with it. If he thought he’d come in here and yell at me, or Jason, then he was wrong. Oh, he could yell, but I’d yell back. I was taking no more shit, and I was definitely making sure that Jason took no more, not from anybody.

Apparently the silence and the staring at each other had gone on long enough to make the nurse nervous. “Why don’t I take you back to your room?”

“Push me closer to the bed, damn it. I didn’t come all this way just to look at him.”

The nurse looked at me, as if for permission, or apology.

“If you can behave yourself, you can come closer; if you came here to bitch or yell, you can go,” I said.

He glared at me, and then his gaze shifted to my hand holding Jason’s. “You really are Jason’s girlfriend, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“And the fact that I’m his father doesn’t cut me any slack with you, does it?”

“Not today it doesn’t.”

“You’d really kick me out of the room. His dying father, out of his only son’s room.”

“If you get nasty, in a heartbeat.”

“And who decides what’s nasty?” he asked.

“Me.”

“You,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, and squeezed Jason’s hand a little tighter.

He looked back at the nurse. “Push me closer, and leave.”

She looked at me again. I nodded. She pushed him closer, but not like she thought it was a good idea. I wasn’t sure either, but I wasn’t sure it was a bad idea either. I didn’t move back, and my chair was moved up so I could hold Jason’s hand. The wheelchair was close enough that our legs almost touched. It was almost too close for comfort, too much interpersonal space crossed, but I stayed where I was, and he didn’t tell the nurse to move him somewhere else.

He laid his hand on Jason’s leg under the covers, then said, “Get out, I’ll buzz you when I need you.”

The nurse gave a look like she wasn’t sure she should be doing it, but she left. He waited for the door to hush closed behind us before he spoke. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe that you were his girlfriend.”

“Me, too.”

We sat there in our chairs, me holding Jason’s hand, him with his big hand on his son’s leg. The room was very quiet, only the whirrs and hush of the monitors on Jason, the faint drip of the various IVs, his and Jason’s. It was the kind of quiet that stretches out and makes your hair itch, because you know you need to say something, but nothing comes to mind. This wasn’t my father. This wasn’t my mess, but somehow I was the one sitting inches away from a dying man while he looked at his injured son.

“You’re not like most women,” he said.

I actually jumped a little, just from him breaking the silence. “What do you mean?” I asked. There, that was a good question, make him talk again.

“Most women need to talk. They hate silences.”

“Sometimes, yes, but I’m okay