Chapter 9
Leo didn't wait. He walked straight to the side of the bed, dropping the wooden flute onto the clean white coverlet before climbing up onto the edge of the mattress with the practiced ease of a child used to small spaces. He reached out and touched his mother’s hand—the skin pale and translucent, covered in purple bruises where the IV needles had gone in.
"Mom," Leo said softly, his voice dropping into that rhythmic cadence he used when he was tired. "I found him. I found the man in the tuxedo."
Clara’s eyelids fluttered. For a second, nothing happened; then her brow twitched, and her dark eyes slowly opened. They didn't look confused or startled. They looked like eyes that had been waiting by an open window for a train that was always forty years late. She turned her head slightly on the pillow, her gaze moving past the boy to the doorway where Julian stood half-shadowed by the frame.
Julian didn't move. He kept his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat, his fingers clenched into fists against the cold fabric.
"You're late, Julian," she whispered. Her voice was like dry paper rubbing together, but the old sharpness, the dry iron of her humor, was still buried underneath the rasp.
Julian took a slow step into the room, the floorboards groaning slightly beneath his weight. "The traffic on the bridge was bad," he said, his voice cracking slightly on the first word before he cleared his throat and forced it back down to its normal, level tone.
Clara let out a small, dry sound that might have been a laugh if she had the air for it. She shifted her hand on the blanket, her fingers brushing against the dark wood of the flute Leo had left beside her pillow.
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"You always did find an excuse to avoid the toll," she said, closing her eyes again as a spasm of pain crossed her face, her breathing hitching on the mechanical hiss of the machine.
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