Chapter 15 — The Quiet Treaty

Air in hospitals had a way of turning conversation into confession. It thinned things down to essentials: names, times, who had been where. Nicole watched the world through that thinning as if she’d been placed between two panes of glass. The room smelled of disinfectant and lemon and the faint bleach of late-night worry. Madeline Crane sat in a visitor’s chair like she belonged to a different century — tailored linen, no ornament that could be mistaken, ...