Chapter 4 - Seventy-Two Hours —
Daniel didn’t come that first night.
Or the next morning.
A television hung in the corner of my hospital room. I asked the nurse to turn it on because silence made me hear the door again.
There he was.
Captain Daniel Mercer stood outside the Grand Hawthorne, soot on his dress shirt, grief arranged across his face.
“My wife is still unaccounted for,” he told a reporter. “Right now, I’m asking everyone to pray.”
Vanessa stood just behind him.
His coat was still around her shoulders.
I stared until the nurse reached for the remote.
“Leave it,” I said.
Daniel pressed a hand over his mouth.
“I tried to get back inside.”
“No,” I whispered.
On television, his lieutenant lowered his eyes.
Ortiz visited that afternoon.
“His name is Ben Harlow,” she said when I asked about him. “He’s giving a statement.”
“What did he say?”
“We’re checking it.”
“Did Daniel go back?”
She held my gaze.
“Not according to the responders we’ve spoken to.”
That night, Miguel came to see me with an officer beside him.
His hands were bandaged. His eyebrows were singed.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He frowned.
“For what?”
“You got hurt helping me.”
He looked at the burns on his hands.
“My mother would be furious if I stood outside knowing somebody was in there.”
I laughed once, and it turned into a cough.
Miguel waited.
“I heard you,” he said quietly. “From the pantry.”
“I thought nobody could.”
“I almost didn’t.”
He looked down.
“There was something on that door before the fire.”
My stomach tightened.
“What?”
“The hotel manager told us it was part of a security inspection. Said nobody should use that passage.”
“Who was with him?”
Miguel glanced at Ortiz.
“Your husband.”
After Miguel left, Ortiz received a call.
She listened without interrupting.
Then she stepped into the hallway. Through the window, I watched her expression harden.
When she came back, she closed the door.
“Daniel called the insurance company this morning.”
I looked at the clock.
Barely forty-eight hours since our wedding.
“About the hotel?”
“No.”
For a moment, all I could hear was the monitor beside me.
“He asked what documentation he would need if your remains couldn’t be identified.”
May you like
My husband still hadn’t visited the hospital.
He was already asking how to collect.
