The hospital parking machine would take her card only if she held it against the reader at an angle. She tried three times, watching the gate remain down. A driver behind her sounded the horn just as the ticket emerged.
“Yes,” she said aloud. “I know.”
She drove up two levels, parked beside a pillar and took a photograph of the level number. Her father used to say that if she couldn't remember where she'd left a whole car, she'd have no hope of finding anything smaller. He'd said it before he'd become the person whose room number she had to photograph, whose little plastic bag of belongings she carried between buildings.
Inside, a woman at the information desk asked whom she was visiting. Nina gave the name. Saying it in public made the errand feel stranger.
“Relationship to the patient?”
“He asked for me. Someone called.”
The woman looked up. Nina could see the next question forming and got her phone out before it was asked.
“They said to come here. I'm Nina Calder.”
The woman made a call, nodded and asked her to take a seat.
There were no two seats together that didn't have somebody's bag on one. Nina chose a place beside a woman asleep upright with her arms folded inside a man's oversized jacket. Across from them, two brothers, or perhaps only two men who looked alike, were arguing quietly about a charger. A little boy pushed a toy car along the seam of his mother's coat. Each time it reached her elbow he made a soft crashing noise and began again.
Nina sent Adam a message to say she was there. She thought about adding that she was still waiting, then didn't. He would ask why. There wouldn't be an answer yet.
The woman beside her stirred. Her sleeve was caught beneath Nina's bag.
“Sorry.” Nina lifted it.
“No, you're fine.” The woman blinked toward the desk. “Did someone come out?”
“Not yet.”
She nodded, already halfway asleep again.
Nina tried the name in her head. Martin Reed. She had worked with a Martin once, a man whose email signature contained three quotations. This was not him. She was sure she would know someone she'd actually dealt with, even over a phone, once he started talking. A voice would supply the missing person.
Her own phone vibrated. Adam wanted to know whether she'd found him. Nina wrote Waiting and put it away before she could see him begin an answer.
A nurse came to collect her. They walked past a row of chairs occupied by people who lifted their faces at each approaching footstep. Nina kept her visitor pass in her hand until the nurse pointed to the clip.
“I don't know what he needs me for,” Nina said as she fastened it.
“He's asked to see you.”
“Is he—” She stopped. She didn't know which question she meant to ask. Whether he was dying, whether he had mistaken her for someone else, whether she was doing something unwise.
The nurse slowed outside a room. “I'll check with him first.”
Through the open part of the door Nina saw a man lying very still, his head turned away from her. Something clear looped beneath his nose. A pale blanket covered the lower part of him. She couldn't have said whether he was forty or sixty.
The nurse went in, spoke to him, and returned.
“He'd like you to come in. Please keep it short.”
Martin turned toward the door when Nina entered. His hair was dark at the damp temples. He looked at her for so long that she wondered whether they had brought her to the wrong person.
“Nina?”
“Yes.”
He moved his fingers on the blanket. There was a folded piece of paper under them.
“You work at Threadline.”
“You gave them a case reference. I was told there was a complaint—”
“Your husband.”
She glanced at the nurse. The nurse was looking at the equipment beside the bed.
“What about him?”
Martin wet his lips. Nina moved the little cup on the table toward him, then stopped, uncertain whether she should. He wasn't looking at it.
“When he calls,” he said, “ask him where you met.”
“Who told you my husband's name?”
He tried to push himself farther up the bed. His mouth changed. He settled back without having moved much at all.
“Where you met,” he said again.
“I know where we met.”
He lifted the folded paper. She took it because he seemed unable to hold it there.
Six Ansel Court. The address was written in blue ink, the six retraced several times.
She knew the address too.
“How do you know Adam?”
Martin drew a breath, and another. The nurse came to the bed.
“Mr. Reed?”
He looked past her at Nina. “Don't ask her—”
“I'll need you to step out now,” the nurse said.
Nina backed away. Someone else entered as she reached the door. The nurse's voice remained level, but it was no longer a voice making room for a visitor.
In the corridor Nina unfolded and refolded the paper. There was nothing inside it. Just the address of the place where she and Adam had spent their first year together, written on what might have been the back of an envelope.
She moved away from the door when another member of staff came through. It opened farther, then closed behind him. She could hear voices, no longer individual words.
A chair stood against the opposite wall. Nina sat, got up again and put the folded paper in her bag. Then she took it out.
She had said she knew where they met. She hadn't asked Martin how he knew. She had asked how he knew Adam, and the answer hadn't come.
Don't ask her.
That might not even have been what he said. She tried to hear it again and found her own voice getting in the way.
The nurse emerged. Nina stepped toward her.
“Can I see him again?”
“Not now. We're looking after him.”
“He was trying to tell me something.”
The nurse's expression softened without changing the answer. “I'm sorry. You'll need to wait outside this area.”
Nina did as she was told. Down the corridor, a man stood with his palm against a closed door, not knocking. She passed him, looking for the exit signs. It took her two wrong turns to return to the place where she had come in.
The woman in the jacket was gone. Her empty chair had acquired a paper cup. The child was asleep across his mother's lap, his car trapped in his fist.
Nina found a bathroom and washed her hands, although she hadn't touched anything she could remember. She put the paper on a dry corner of the counter. The address looked unremarkable beneath the bright lights, the sort of thing a person wrote so a delivery wouldn't go astray.
For a year Nina had given that address whenever anyone asked where she lived. She knew which front window stuck and which step clicked beneath a heavy foot. She had slept above its small kitchen, brushed her teeth looking out at the brick wall across the court, learned the sound of Adam coming home below her.
She dried her hands and picked up the paper.
Outside the bathroom she stopped beside a vending machine. She didn't want to call him. It was the first time since they had met that not wanting to talk to Adam had felt like needing him.