“Same thing,” she said.

By ten that evening, the cardiac floor had quieted. I finished my notes, changed my white coat for a navy cardigan, and told myself I was going home. Instead I found myself outside Ethan’s room.

The door was open. He sat near the window with a telemetry monitor beneath his hospital shirt, the city spread beyond the glass in a field of gold and red lights.

He was holding a photograph — not one of the surveillance pictures, but a photograph of us, standing beside Lake Michigan during our first winter together, bundled in coats, laughing as snow caught in my hair.

I remembered the stranger who’d taken it. I remembered Ethan slipping the printed copy into his wallet before we had even walked away.

“You kept that?” I asked.