He and Annie and Natasha hadn’t been on many happy little family outings together, and he didn’t have much experience with the device. He was glad that the orderly who had wheeled Natasha and him out to the car had gone back inside the building and wasn’t watching the struggle. During this lengthy process, Neal avoided looking at Natasha’s face. She had fallen asleep, but he had a gnawing fear that her eyes would pop open and she would say...well, he didn’t know what she might say. The thought of her speaking at all terrified him. When he finally finished strapping her in, he went around to the back of the car and tossed the two crutches the nurse in the emergency room had given him into the trunk, along with his unused right sneaker. The nurse had done a good job bandaging up his foot, but there was now no way he could put his sneaker on. It didn’t matter—he could drive just as well shoeless. It was a depressing night, a cold drizzle falling from the sky.
