The next time Meena asks me to coffee it's not on the trauma ward; she finds me in pharmacy, trying to sort a shelf of new bottles that are about to go out to patients. I keep thinking I've done it right, but every time I go back, there are errors. She finds me and says "What's so funny?"

"Am I laughing?" I ask.

She shrugs. "Looked like you were smiling," she says. "Trick of the light. Want a cup of coffee?"

"No one's going to drop in here for a few minutes," I say. She looks up at the security cameras that keep me from stealing all the Inderal. "They don't record sound."

"I'm making some good progress," she says. "I think I've ruled some people out. And there's a guy in biostat who offered to look at the times. Hopefully he can narrow it down."

There's a bit of a pause; I work, she watches me. At last she speaks again. "You know my brother-in-law's involved in the investigation of Mauricio's death," she says.

"Officer Hart. I remember."

"He told me they found something. A set of bloody scrubs in the women's bathroom in rad-onc."

I don't think I react. She doesn't act like I react. "OK."

"They had DNA from two sources. The blood was Mauricio's. There was also hair and blood from Latasha West."

"Who's Latasha West?"

"The DV I couldn't resuscitate. Her body was the one that disappeared." She gives me a long look and takes an audibly shaky breath. "Drake, the morning Mauricio was killed, you left work with an African-American woman in scrubs. I saw you get on your bike with her and ride home."

"She was homeless," I say. "She'd been attacked by her husband. She came inside the hospital to get warm, and got lost. I fed her and offered her a place to sleep for the night."

"You took a homeless woman home?"

"It has a nice sort of lock-and-key thing going, doesn't it?" I say.

What I know I should say is "We didn't have sex," but then it's "I never said you did" when really she thinks I'm lying, and that's almost as bad if I said we did have sex, which for a moment I think about saying, because that almost seems like the best thing, to pretend that I partook of the sort of lowness that people find so easy to believe of one another, rather than tell the truth—that I took her into my home, that I made her part of our little bulwark against the night. And then I get angry, that Meena thinks I'd sooner have bartered for sex with a desperate woman than lent a hand to an intelligent, capable person in her hour of need and made a friend.

There's a sharp report; Meena and I both jump. The orange plastic bottle in my left hand is cracked. "Those childproof lids," says Meena, because something needed saying.

"Tell me about it," I say, reading the label: Generic warfarin. Blood thinners.

"What was her name?" Meena asks.

"I never asked her." Not quite She never told me.

"Ah," she says, and I know she's made the leap I wanted her to make, and I hate it.

"Drake," she says after a moment.

"Meena?"

"You know Jack went missing, right?"
"I know it."

"And, knowing that, you might think I was looking for something I can trust. Something I can rely on not to go away."

I can be trapped, of course, but not that easily.

"I just want you to know I never expected that to be you."

I literally don't even understand these words. I'm staring like a dog watching a card trick, but Meena doesn't see it, or doesn't care. She lays a hand on my upper arm. "All right, Drake. I won't keep you."

I finally manage to shake a few words loose. "You don't really think I went home with Latasha West, did you?"

"Of course not," she says. "That would be crazy." She laughs a little as she says it, and I hear the rattle of old glass, thin-blown.

"Then why... ?" I wave my hands.

"It was a weird night, Drake. I'm just trying to understand it all. The events, and my own thoughts."

Something I can trust. Something I can rely on not to go away. "Of course."

She smiles, turns, and says "Good-bye," so casually I know she really means it.