Wade lunged for the camera, but Jonah caught his wrist before his fingers reached the stop button.
“Don’t.” Jonah’s voice was low enough that it seemed to come from somewhere beneath the fluorescent hum. His hand stayed locked around Wade’s forearm, knuckles white, while the little camera continued to throw Randall’s frozen face against the cinder-block wall. “You’ve had a year of deciding what we were allowed to know. You don’t get another second.”
Wade did not pull away. That frightened me more than if he had. He simply stared at Jonah’s hand as though he had expected it, perhaps rehearsed this moment too, and then slowly let his own arm fall. “You’re right,” he said. “But what comes next isn’t going to make any of you feel better.”
Elise gave a short, breathless laugh that held no humor. She still had the hospital wristband curled in her palm, the plastic crushed until the printed letters had bent around her fingers. “That’s what you keep saying before every new thing that makes it worse.”
