“Down here,” Ruth croaked. “The basement…”
She heard the back door rattle, then the crash of something giving way. Footsteps thundered across the kitchen. Then the basement light snapped on, and Daniel was kneeling beside her.
He moved quickly and calmly, the way she supposed people did in hospitals. He checked her pulse, wrapped his own jacket around her and spoke into his phone, giving her address to the ambulance dispatcher in a steady voice.
But his hands, she noticed, were shaking.
“How did you know?” she whispered.
“Your curtains,” he said. “You open them every morning at seven. Every single morning. Today they stayed closed. I knew something was wrong.”
He had been watching over her. All this time.
In the ambulance, he held her hand and would not let go. At the hospital, the doctors told her she had broken her hip and would need surgery. Daniel stayed in the waiting room through all of it. When she woke up afterward, groggy and sore, he was sitting in the chair beside her bed.
“You should go home and rest,” she murmured.
“I’ve waited a long time to sit with you, Mrs. Callahan,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Ruth looked at him, really looked at him, in the soft light of the hospital room. There was something about his eyes. Something she had seen before, a very long time ago.
“Daniel,” she said slowly, “who are you?”
He took a deep breath and reached into his pocket.
“I think,” he said, “it’s time I showed you.”
He pulled out a folded piece of paper, old and soft as cloth, and placed it gently in her hand.