Riza opened her eyes more or less in the same place she'd been all night--or what part of the night they'd been allowed. She was ashamed of herself, but it wasn't her fear that kept her in her room. She could only owe it to a fair amount of rare indecision tempered with an expectation that she would somehow repeat the previous night.

Now that it seemed to be morning, however, she felt more ridiculous for having wasted the night in seeming cowardice.

It wasn't until she sat up that she noticed the room wasn't at all the way it had been when she last saw it: there was another bed, another closet--and another woman Riza hadn't seen before. She was still sleeping.

Although Riza wasn't accustomed to judging other people by such a scale, the woman was beautiful, and had Riza other goals in her life, she might have been given to jealousy.

When the nurse entered, Riza stood, and when she was finally given her options after the usual saccharine salutation, she remembered the announcement and chose to avoid the surprise. Even as a girl she avoided anything she couldn't predict, and even though the alternative now was the sun room, she chose it instead.

She didn't recognize many in the room, but she did recognize Ed, even before he begrudgingly responded to his visitor. His arm didn't seem to be working exactly right . . . but that indicated that he'd got into a worse scrape last night. It hadn't been like that yesterday morning.

She turned away, deciding to sidestep that conversation anyway, but it only brought her to another familiar face from that night. Even if she'd only glimpsed him in the dark, it was perhaps his mannerisms that she recognized most.

Again, she almost turned away, but with a more customary discipline she sat next to him on the sofa before she could hide from that event again.

"I hope you are recovering swiftly," she began quietly, straightforward but sympathetic.