It's time. I clock out on break and head across the street to Javelina, the café across the street. Tasha didn't want to meet so close to the hospital, but I wanted to be able to see Meena.

I walk across the park that Officer Hart hid my bike in and find a big tree at the edge to blend in against. The day is bright, even though there isn't any sun, but I feel invisible. A scalloped awning keeps the storefront dry, so my view through the plate glass is perfect, and so's my timing: Tasha is sitting at a table, two cups of coffee sending obscure signals up into the café's bare girders, and Meena walks in as I watch.

Why did I think she would look different? She doesn't look different. She sees Tasha, does the math, sits down. She points at the coffee; Tasha tells her what it is; she looks at it as though there's a spider in the cup, but takes a sip. It's a message: what she always ordered when we went there, when she could afford a six-dollar coffee whose order sounded like a menu. That was early in our affair—before I was attacked, before John walked out on her. It wasn't long ago, but it feels like centuries.

Meena takes another sip, as though assuring herself that the coffee's what she thought it was, then looks Tasha straight in the eye and says something. That iron eye hits me like the smell of pecans and molasses—an ancient memory, or the functional equivalent. Nothing like the timid, brittle conversations we've had lately. It only hits me now the cause of all that bitter circumspection sits across the table from its victim, or one of them. If Meena hadn't seen me take Tasha home—

I can't finish the sentence. I don't know. Mauricio Quinoñes would still be dead. And whatever demons drove Meena to kill her patients, they didn't come from Tasha.

It starts to rain—lightly enough, but in five minutes I'll be soaked. I look up at the bright sky. The devil's beating his wife, my grandmother would have said. He seems to have been in a foul mood, these last few weeks.

Tasha speaks and puts her lips to her coffee, though I don't see a swallow move her throat. Meena's eyes go wide. I wonder whether she herself doesn't understand what she's done—whether her mind has somehow managed to divide itself, to veil her sins from consciousness with strategic inattention and well-crafted stories. I feel a pain in my right wrist; I'm digging the nails of my left hand into it, almost hard enough to draw blood.

But Meena doesn't run away. She doesn't stand, she doesn't scream, she doesn't look away with the disdain for nonsense that I always loved. She listens. It's all I need to see.

I stop for a bite, dry-swallow a pill, clock back in, and head back to the stockroom. The place is in total disarray—I don't know how Jeff and Marco could have done this in twenty minutes, but they have. I start at "A," where they've put all the warfarin, and start organizing the bottles by patient. It takes me a minute to notice the note. It's in John's handwriting, the same scraggly letters in which I read the names of a thousand disgusting parasites. It says Don't go home.

I go home.