Snippet #1198082

Had Jack been a more argumentative person, he might have tried to berate her into telling him why she'd followed him to the hospital. If he'd been a more stubborn person, he might have simply turned around and walked out of the hospital, refusing to believe what his own eyes had just witnessed.

Instead, he watched her disappear (and there was no other word for it; she seemed to dissolve through the door into the room beyond) then did as he was told. He felt instinctively that she was telling the truth; there was something in that little side-room that would explain why she was here, why he couldn't touch her and why no one else seemed to be able to see her. He sat back and let the current take him.

He knocked briefly on the door to the side-room then stepped inside, holding out another card from the stash in his pocket.

"Sorry, Mrs Peterson; I've just realised the card I gave you has my old cell number on it. Take this one- it's my current number," he said, not giving her a chance to interrupt placing the card into her hand. Maybe she wouldn't even notice that the cards had identical numbers on.

In the moment between handing the older woman the business card and closing the door again, he glanced around the little room. Another girl; ash-blond and tearful- a friend or a sister perhaps- and a man, about Jack's own age with the build of a heavyweight boxer stood either side of Mrs Peterson. The bed around which the whole room was centred was a steel-framed monster with a thick mattress and starched sheeted, wires and tubes snaking out over its sides like vines overgrowing a window box. The blonde woman with the red lipstick stood beside it, wearing that same disconcerting look of anger, loneliness and sadness she'd given him out in the corridor. And Alexa Peterson, the occupant of the bed...

Jack barely managed not to do a double-take before nodding to the others in quiet respect and shutting the door on the static scene. Once outside, he walked briskly to the end of the ward and waited outside its double doors in the now-empty lobby, his head fuzzy with disbelief.

The blonde and Alexa Peterson were one and the same. A mirror image had looked down on her paler, sleeping other self with emotion that her twin was unable to express. Had he really been talking to a comatose woman?

He decided to let Alexa herself answer that question.