"But I heard more than just a person hitting the floor. I also heard the late-night snack I prepared for you two go crashing down. That room must be an absolute disaster right now."
"So clean it up first."
"Otherwise, what will people think?"
I almost laughed.
A man in cardiac arrest, every second ticking down between life and death, and the condition for unlocking the door was a freshly mopped floor. No clean room, no way out. No paramedics in.
But I wasn't surprised. And I wasn't in any rush.
Because this wasn't the first time I'd lived through it.
Dick and I had brought Lily back to his hometown to visit Kate. When we arrived, we discovered she'd renovated the mansion we'd built for her yet again.
She'd knocked three second-floor bedrooms into one sprawling suite, converting it into a two-bedroom apartment with its own living area. Ugly security bars had been bolted over the windows, completely out of place on a house like that.
The suite's door had two new handles that didn't match anything else. In my previous life, I'd noticed them and thought nothing of it. It wasn't until after what happened to Lily that I understood: they were there so the door could be locked from the outside.
So.