Not silent, nowhere was silent for her, but quiet in the way that mattered. The dead here had settled. They weren't confused anymore, weren't clinging to the threshold between breath and whatever came after. The woman on the second table had been watching Eulalia work for the past hour, but she asked nothing, demanded nothing. She simply observed, as the dead sometimes did, waiting for answers that Eulalia could not give her.
The heart sat in a steel dish beneath the examination lamp.
Sister Eulalia had extracted it herself, following the procedure Dr. Crane had demonstrated three weeks prior. The Y-incision had been precise. The ribs had separated with the crack she'd learned to anticipate but never quite grew accustomed to—that sound of structure yielding, of the body's architecture opening like a reliquary to reveal what it had hidden. The lungs had been unremarkable. The liver showed the expected damage from years of determined drinking. But the heart.
The heart was why she'd stayed.
Her gloves lay beside her sketchbook, fingers bare for the first time in hours. She could not draw with the leather between her skin and the pencil; the lines came out wrong, imprecise, and precision was the entire point. The heart would not transmit anything. It was muscle and valve and vessel, emptied of blood and memory alike. Whatever the man had felt, whatever loves or griefs had made it race or stutter, had departed with the rest of him. The organ that remained was simply meat. Beautiful meat, but meat nonetheless.
She sketched the left ventricle wall where it had thickened, the muscle grown dense and stubborn in its effort to compensate for what the valves could no longer do. Hypertrophic. She wrote the word in small, neat letters beside the drawing, then added the measurement she'd taken with calipers. The illustration was taking shape beneath her pencil—not an anatomical diagram from a textbook but something more careful, more attentive. She drew what she saw. The striation of muscle fiber, the pale fatty deposits, the place where the tissue had begun to fail.
The man himself stood near the door, watching her draw his heart.
"You might have mentioned the chest pains," she said without looking up. "They would have caught this sooner."
He shrugged. The dead so often shrugged. Didn't seem worth the fuss, he said, or something like it—the words arrived more as impression than sound. Thought it was indigestion.
"It was not indigestion."
I know that now.
She added shading to the left atrium. The ghost drifted closer, peering at the sketch with the peculiar interest of someone seeing themselves from the outside for the first time.
That's quite good, he offered.
"I know...Thank you."
The cold of the morgue had settled into her bones hours ago, and she welcomed it. Her cell at the convent was never cold enough; the Mother Superior insisted on fires in the grates, as though warmth were a kindness rather than an intrusion. Here, the chill seeped through her habit and found the skin beneath, numbing the constant hum of sensation that never quite left her. Here, she could almost think.
The woman on the second table had stopped watching. The man with the failed heart had wandered back toward the door, his interest in his own organ apparently exhausted. Sister Eulalia turned the page of her sketchbook and began a new study—a cross-section this time, showing the valve where the failure had begun.
She did not hear the footsteps in the corridor.
She rarely heard footsteps when she was like this, sunk into the work, her attention narrowed to the point of her pencil and the truth written in tissue. The dead noticed before she did. The man by the door turned toward the hallway, then looked back at her with something that might have been warning.
She did not look up.