Page 92 of Wrong Mail

"What blanks?"

"About his past. About what happened in Portland. About whatever really ended their marriage."

"Elaine."

Richard Thomas closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, something has given way behind them. I recognize it. He's kept something buried for years, and he's just realized I'm here to dig it up.

"I told David,” he says, almost to himself. “The past doesn't stay buried. It waits."

"What does?"

He looks at me. "I gather David doesn't know you're here."

"No, and I'd prefer to keep it that way."

Richard looks away, as if weighing what he's about to share. "You didn't hear it from me. Okay?"

I nod.

"David was someone I considered a close friend." He says it like a defense and an apology at once. "He was the best surgeon I have ever worked next to. I liked him. I covered for him, and I'm not proud of the second one." He looks at his hands, surgeon's hands, scrubbed pink. "There was an intern. Years ago, when he was still married to Elaine. Bright girl, quick, everybody's favorite for about a year. David had everything, a wife, a daughter, a career the rest of us would have killed for. But he loved the attention. He couldn't leave it alone."

"Her name?"

He hesitates, and the hesitation is its own confirmation. Then he gives me the thing I already have, but hearing it out loud still takes the floor out from under me.

"Lena," he says. "Lena Holloway."

The name lands where I've been keeping it all week.

Now that Richard has placed it here in Oregon, four years deep, I can't pretend it means nothing anymore.

"It got complicated," Thomas says. "These things do. And David is a man who cannot survive being complicated in public."

He looks down at his hands.

"So he used what he had. He held a senior position. She was nothing yet. By the time it was done, there was a note in her file and a bad reference following her around. She was out of the program, and David was still David.”

A quiet beat follows.

"His marriage came apart quietly after that. He never got so much as a hearing over any of it, because that is what money and standing and a good reputation buy you."

He meets my eyes.

"I helped him look clean. I wrote one of the letters of support. We all just wanted it to go away. And it did."

He goes still for a moment.

"Then he did."

Richard exhales like he's been holding that breath for years.

"I'll tell you the truth, Mrs. Grant, because you came four hours in the rain for it."

He stands, because our time is up and a body is waiting for him behind a door.

"After Lena," he says, "everyone was relieved when David left quietly. We stopped asking questions about him the day he stopped being our problem. I've wondered since whether that was a mistake. I suppose you're here to tell me it was."

I say nothing.