The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

sharing an enclosed space that seemed far too close. She stood with both hands thrust in her coat pockets and stoically watched the floor numbers change, wondering: Is it a sin to find a priest attractive?
    If not sin, then certainly folly.
    The elevator door at last opened, and she followed him down the hallway, through a set of double doors, into the coronary care unit. Like the Surgical ICU, this unit had its lights dimmed for the night, and he led her through the gloom toward the EKG monitor station.
    The heavyset nurse sitting in front of the monitors glanced up from the multiple cardiac tracings and her teeth shone in a smiling arc.
    “Father Brophy. Making night rounds?”
    He touched the nurse’s shoulder, an easy, familiar gesture that spoke of a comfortable friendship. Maura was reminded of the first time she had glimpsed Brophy, crossing the snowy courtyard below Camille’s bedroom. How he had laid a comforting hand on the shoulder of the elderly nun who had greeted him. This was a man who was not afraid to offer the warmth of his touch.
    “Evening, Kathleen,” he said, and the soft lilt of Boston Irish suddenly slipped into his voice. “Have you had a quiet night, then?”
    “So far, knock on wood. Did the nurses call you in to see someone?”
    “Not for one of your patients. We were upstairs, in SICU. I wanted to bring Dr. Isles down here for a visit.”
    “At two A . M .?” Kathleen laughed and looked at Maura. “He’ll run you ragged. This man doesn’t rest.”
    “Rest?” said Brophy. “What’s that?”
    “It’s that thing we lesser mortals do.”
    Brophy looked at the monitor. “And how is our Mr. DeMarco doing?”
    “Oh, your special patient. He’s being transferred to an unmonitored bed tomorrow. So I’d say he’s doing great.”
    Brophy pointed to bed number six’s EKG line, blipping serenely across the screen. “There,” he said, touching Maura’s arm, and his breath whispered against her hair. “That’s what I wanted to show you.”
    “Why?” asked Maura.
    “Mr. DeMarco is the man we saved, on the sidewalk.” He looked at her. “The man you predicted wouldn’t live. That’s our miracle. Yours and mine.”
    “Not necessarily a miracle. I’ve been known to be wrong.”
    “You’re not in the least bit surprised that this man is going to walk out of the hospital?”
    She looked at him in the quiet intimacy of darkness. “There’s not a lot that surprises me anymore, I’m sorry to say.” She didn’t mean to sound cynical, but that’s how it came out, and she wondered if he was disappointed in her. It seemed important to him, for some reason, that she express some sense of wonderment, and all she had given him was the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
    In the elevator down to the lobby, she said, “I’d like to believe in miracles, Father. I really would. But I’m afraid you can’t change the opinion of an old skeptic.”
    He responded with a smile. “You were given a brilliant mind, and of course you were meant to use it. To ask your own questions and find your own answers.”
    “I’m sure you ask the same questions I do.”
    “Every day.”
    “Yet you accept the concept of the divine. Isn’t your faith ever shaken?”
    A pause. “Not my faith, no. That, I can count on.”
    She heard a faint note of uncertainty in his voice and she looked at him. “Then what do you question?”
    He met her gaze, a look that seemed to peer straight into her mind, to read the very thoughts she did not want him to see. “My strength,” he said quietly. “Sometimes I question my own strength.”
    Outside, standing alone in the hospital parking lot, she took in punishing breaths of cold air. The sky was clear, the stars a hard glitter. She climbed into her car and sat for a moment as the engine warmed, trying to understand what had just happened between her and Father Brophy. Nothing at all, really, but she was feeling as guilty as though something
had
happened. Both guilty and exhilarated.
    She drove home on streets polished with an icy sheen, thinking about Father Brophy and Victor. She had been tired when she’d left the house; now she was alert and edgy, nerves humming, feeling more alive than she’d felt in months.
    She pulled into the garage, and was already tugging off her coat as she walked into her house. Already unbuttoning her blouse as she moved toward the bedroom. Victor slept soundly, unaware that she was standing right beside him, shedding her