They left me on Fifth Avenue.
January. Thirty-one degrees. I know because there was a bank sign across the street with a temperature display, and I had nothing else to look at.
I was sitting on the sidewalk in my bra and underwear with my back against a parking meter. My hands were in my lap. I couldn't hold them any other way. Every time I tried to move my fingers, the world went white at the edges.
People stopped. Some of them just stared. Some of them took out their phones.
One woman crouched down and asked if I needed help. She had a green scarf. I remember the green scarf. I told her I was fine. She didn't believe me but she didn't know what to do with that, so she stood back up and made a call to someone.
A man in a delivery jacket draped his coat over my shoulders without saying anything. He just set it there and walked away. I don't know his name. I think about him sometimes.
The footage was online within the hour. I know because someone turned their screen toward me to show me. They thought I'd want to see. Forty thousand views by noon. Comments underneath. People arguing about whether I was drunk or homeless or both.
My phone was still in my coat pocket. My coat was somewhere in the parking garage.
The hospital administrator reached me through a stranger's phone at 2 p.m. He was very sorry. A formal review had been triggered. I was placed on administrative leave pending the outcome. He said it twice, the part about being very sorry.
Doctors Without Borders called at 4:47. My placement had been reviewed in light of the pending medical commission investigation. They were revoking the appointment. The woman on the phone had a careful voice. The kind people use when they've rehearsed the call.
I sat on the sidewalk and listened and said I understood.
I understood everything. That was the problem.
Alistair's car pulled up at five.
He got out alone. No security. Just him in his gray suit, hands in his pockets, looking down at me the way you look at something you've already decided about.
'I'm not finished,' he said.
I looked up at him. The man with the green scarf woman was still nearby. A few other people watching from a careful distance. He didn't seem to notice them or care.
He reached down. Not gently. He got me to my feet and walked me to the car and I went because my hands were useless and I had nowhere else to be.
We drove west. I watched the city give way to water. He didn't speak. I didn't ask.
Alki Beach in January is a gray place. Gray sky, gray water, gray stones. The wind off Puget Sound cuts straight through borrowed jackets. I stood at the railing and looked at the water and thought about nothing at all.
Then I heard him open the car door behind me.
He was carrying a ceramic urn. White, with a simple blue band around the middle. I had one exactly like it on the shelf in my home office. I had carried it from my mother's funeral service to three different apartments over seven years. I knew its weight the way you know the weight of something you've picked up ten thousand times.
The world tilted.
'No,' I said. My voice came out strange. Too small. 'Alistair. No.'
He walked past me to the railing.
'Don't.' I moved toward him. My hands were useless. I grabbed at his arm with my wrists, my forearms, anything. 'Don't do this. Please. That's all I have left. That's the only thing —'
He tilted the urn.
The ashes were gray. They caught the wind for a moment, just a moment, like they were still something, and then the Sound took them. The water closed over them without any ceremony at all.
I screamed. I know I screamed because the sound tore something on the way out. I clawed at his jacket with hands that couldn't close. I screamed her name. I screamed things that weren't words. I watched the last of it dissolve into the gray water and I kept screaming even after there was nothing left to see.
Then I stopped.
It was very quiet. Just the water and the wind and the sound of my own breathing.
I looked at Alistair. He was watching me with that flat, decided face. Waiting to see what I would do next.
I understood then that there was nothing left. Not my career. Not my hands. Not my mother. Not the five years I had given him. Not the woman I had been before any of this. All of it was gone, and he was standing here in his gray suit making sure I knew it.
'You win,' I said.
I climbed the railing.
It wasn't hard. My hands couldn't grip but I didn't need them to. I just had to stop holding on.
The water was black and very cold and it closed over me like a door shutting.
I didn't fight it.
I didn't hear him call for help. Maybe he did. Maybe he stood there for a while first, watching the surface, making sure.
The current took me south. I didn't know that then. I didn't know anything.
I was just gone.
