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his watch. “We should. Please excuse us,” he said. He reached into an inside jacket pocket and pulled out a business card. “A new exhibit opens on Friday. Blake and Alain’s work will be on display. I’d like you both to come.” He handed the card to Liz, including Alex with a glance.
    Their fingers brushed as she took the card. Instead of the electric shock she’d feared, only a faint shiver passed between them. It left a tenderness in her chest as it faded, like a nearly-healed bruise.
    “The show is at eight,” Rainer continued. “I hope to see you there.” He collected his coat and umbrella and offered Antja a hand out of the booth. Light rippled across the door as they stepped outside, and then they vanished into the gathering dusk.
    Liz and Alex exchanged a glance and she swallowed the urge to say I told you so . He acknowledged it all the same, a wry tilt of his head.
    “Well,” he said, snaking out an arm to claim the last of her baklava. “This is an interesting development.”

4
Death by Water
    I T WAS ONLY a hospital.
    Liz had visited them often enough: her own childhood tumbles, her aunt’s hysterectomy and grandmother’s bypass, Alex’s bout of pneumonia two years ago. Nothing dramatic. Nothing traumatic. Lions Gate was no worse than any of those. But the smell of air freshener and plastic and cafeteria coffee still set her nerves on edge.
    It was a hospital, she told herself. Not a morgue.
    Liz looked straight ahead as she followed Dr. Haddad down the beige-and-sepia hallway, boots squicking softly on the tiles. She concentrated on the sway of the woman’s black braid against her burgundy scrubs and kept her eyes away from open doorways; she needed all her resolve for Blake.
    “Mr. Morgenstern called,” Dr. Haddad had said when she met them in the lobby. “He told me to expect you. You’re Mr. Enderly’s sister?” Her eyebrow had quirked when she said it, as if she knew it for a lie. But Liz had nodded, dry-mouthed, and the doctor had accepted her answer.
    She was no good at lying, but for Blake she was willing to try.
    “You can’t stay long, I’m afraid,” the doctor said when they reached the room. “His condition is still guarded.”
    “We understand,” Liz said. “We appreciate anything you can do.”
    The room was silent except for the noise of machines and the faint buzz of the lights. The other beds were empty, their privacy curtains pushed back. Liz nearly stopped in the doorway, but she forced herself to keep moving.
    Coma . She’d repeated the word over and over in her head until it became a meaningless collection of sounds. She had braced herself, she’d thought. She was prepared.
    She hadn’t. She wasn’t. Her chest tightened as she focused on the solitary form in the bed. She couldn’t get enough breath.
    He’d cut his hair. Amidst the mechanical spider web of tubes and wires, the beep and hum of monitors, that struck her hardest of all. It had been the thing she’d noticed first six years ago—a skinny teenage boy sitting cross-legged on the hood of a rust-mottled car, elbow-length chestnut hair falling in front of his face as he hunched over a sketchbook. Now it was a tangled brown shock, sea wrack washed against the pillow.
    Other details filtered through more slowly: bruised and sunken eyes, cheekbones too sharp, shadows pooled in the hollow of his throat. Blake had always been thin, but now he was whittled down to bone and sinew. A tube wormed across his cheek and into his nose—her throat convulsed at the sight.
    Liz swallowed sour spit and reached for his right hand—another tube was taped into his left. She flinched at the touch: too cold, veins too stark. Tendons and metacarpals stood out through flesh like sticks in a rice paper fan.
    “Blake.” She choked on his name. “I’m here.”
    No response, not even a flicker of eyelids. She’d never seen his face so empty before; even in sleep there had been some furrowing of his brow, some