The Forty-Eight Hours
Chapter 1 — The Forty-Eight Hours
The hospital doors had swallowed CJ, and the corridor had swallowed everyone else.
Security officers ran past Lin. Police questioned guests whose formal clothes still smelled of perfume and champagne. Someone argued about a camera recording. Someone else asked where the reporters were being held. Every person seemed to have a task, a destination, a voice.
No one looked at the woman crouched against the wall.
Her dress was stained with his blood. The ring he had slipped onto her finger only minutes before glittered whenever her shaking hands moved. She had tried to wipe them clean, but the red remained beneath her nails.
CJ’s assistant found her long after the first rush of ambulances and hospital staff had passed.
“Miss Lin?” He knelt in front of her. “Are you okay?”
She lifted her face. “No.”
He had worked beside CJ long enough to answer problems with calendars, calls and carefully arranged documents. He had no document for this.
“Don’t worry,” he managed. “I’m sure the boss will make it.”
Lin looked past him at the doors.
They waited. At some point the assistant sat beside her. The bright corridor became quieter, then bright again as another group of nurses passed. Lin measured time by the opening and closing of a door that never seemed to be the one she needed.
Finally a surgeon stepped out.
He was frowning.
Lin stood so quickly the world tilted beneath her feet.
“He’s out of immediate danger,” the doctor said. “But we have to keep him in a medically induced coma for at least forty-eight hours. Those hours are critical. If he passes through them safely, we will have a much better chance of recovery.”
Lin held her breath, waiting for the one sentence he could not give her.
“We’ve done everything we can for now. I’m sorry. We must wait.”
Forty-eight hours.
An entire future reduced to a number.
The assistant touched her shoulder. “Miss Lin, please let me help you. You need some rest. Mr. CJ will need things from home. We can’t do anything here tonight.”
She shook her head at first, looking toward the operating room. Then she nodded.
They drove without conversation until Lin saw herself in the passenger-side window. There was blood on her collar. On the fabric beneath the seat belt. On the ring.
“I need to wash,” she whispered.
The assistant changed direction at once. “I’ll take you to your apartment. I’ll wait.”
Inside, Lin removed her ruined dress with slow, awkward movements. She washed until the water ran clear, then kept washing. When she slipped her ring from her finger, she cried at the little red mark left against the gold. She cleaned the ring, dried it and put it back on.
It took her almost an hour to get dressed. Outside, the assistant had fallen asleep behind the wheel. She tapped the window; he startled awake, apologized, and drove her to CJ’s apartment.
At the door, he entered the access code and handed her the bag.
“I’ll come in the morning and take you back to the hospital.”
“Okay.”
“Try to sleep, Miss Lin.”
“Okay.”
He left her in a home she had never entered before.
The silence was immense.
