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you? He’s wanted for murder.”
    It took just fifteen minutes for the nurses to finish their lunch, but it seemed like an eternity to Tristan. When the three of them carried their trays to the drop-off station, Tristan stood up and followed, quietly calling Andy’s name.
    The nurse turned and gazed at Tristan with the same quick, assessing look he had worn when Tristan was his patient.
    “Sorry,” said Tristan, “but I had to ditch the robe.”
    Andy’s eyes widened, then he turned to his companions, who had started toward the hall. “I’ll see you upstairs,” he called to them. When they had moved on, he turned back. “Guy?” he asked, using the name Tristan had been given when he didn’t know his identity.
    Tristan nodded.
    “Jesus! What are you doing here? Tempting fate?”
    “I have to talk to you. Can you sit—just for a minute—please?” Tristan gestured to the table where he had left his coffee. Andy followed him.
    For a moment they sat quietly, Andy taking the seat against the window, Tristan facing away from the crowd in the cafeteria.
    “You look well,” Andy said in a low voice.
    “I owe you my life.”
    “Don’t exaggerate.”
    “I’m not. I—”
    “You do owe me the robe I gave you so you wouldn’t moon the other patients in your hospital gown.”
    Tristan laughed a little, and Andy smiled, his tan face lighting up, his expression younger than the weathered lines around his eyes. Then he glanced around. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, but you’d better cut to the chase. Hospitals are full of nosy people. Why are you here?”
    “I need information. When I came in, what was my medical condition?”
    “I didn’t see you until you were brought up to my floor.”
    “But you must have read the reports from the ER.”
    Andy nodded. “You’d swallowed a lot of saltwater. Because you were so confused when you regained consciousness, we thought there was brain trauma, but the scans showed nothing. Have you gotten back your memory?”
    Tristan shook his head. “No. I can’t recall anything from the life of a guy named Luke.”
    Andy studied him curiously, perhaps because of the way Tristan had phrased it. But Tristan didn’t see how he could add that the guy named Luke wasn’t him—not without the nurse recommending he reconsider seeing the hospital psychiatrist.
    “You don’t remember . . . anything?” Andy asked slowly.
    “You mean like committing murder? No.”
    “Your blood alcohol level was elevated,” the nurse said. “Everyone has a different threshold for inebriation, depending on their physical makeup and their history of drinking, but I remember being surprised your number wasn’t much higher. You were unconscious for a long time. You had lost blood, but not an excessive amount—the knife wound wasn’t as deep as it appeared. You could have been knocked out by a blow to the head, but as I said, there were no signs of a serious blow. Despite the seawater you swallowed, there were no signs of oxygen deprivation from being underwater for an extended period of time. You were a true medical puzzle.
    “And speaking of medical puzzles,” Andy added, “how’s Ivy?”
    “You knew?” Tristan asked, surprised. He hunched over. “They put her in the paper, didn’t they?”
    “No. They didn’t. Under eighteen, they protect your identity. But Ivy came to see me the same afternoon you left here. And besides, the day I sent her friends and her to the solarium, hoping to cheer you up, I saw your face when you shot out of there.” Andy smiled. “She’d gotten under your skin. And I saw you go back after her friends left.”
    “You don’t miss much,” Tristan said.
    “No, just my patients checking out by way of the stairwell,” Andy replied dryly. “Guy—Luke—there’s one more thing. We did toxicology tests and no drugs showed up.But there are drugs, not the kind people use by choice, that don’t leave an identifiable chemical trace in the body. The