The resident signed my discharge papers, wrote me prescriptions for Vicodin and Cipro, and turned me over to the nursing staff. A nurse’s aide handed me the remnants of my clothes. I could wear the trousers, although they smelled sooty and had bits of the hillside embedded in them, but my coat, jacket, and rose silk blouse had all been slit across the shoulders. Even my bra strap had been cut. It was the silk shirt that made me start to cry, that and the jacket. They were part of a cherished outfit; I’d worn them in the morning-yesterday morning-to make a presentation to a downtown client before heading to the South Side.

The nurse’s aide didn’t care about my grief one way or another, but she did agree I couldn’t go out in public without any clothes. She went to the charge nurse, who scrounged an old sweatshirt for me from someplace. By the time we’d done all that, and found an orderly to wheel me to the lobby, it was almost nine.

Conrad had used police privilege to park right in front of the entrance. He was asleep when the orderly wheeled me out, but he came to when I opened the passenger door.

“Woof. Long night, Ms. W., long night.” He knuckled sleep from his eyes and put the car into gear. “You still in the old crib up by Wrigley? I heard you mention a boyfriend to the doc.”

“Yes.” To my annoyance, my mouth was dry and the word came out as a squawk.

“Not that Ryerson guy, I trust.”

“Not the Ryerson guy. Morrell. A writer. He got shot to pieces last summer covering the Afghanistan war.”

Conrad grunted in a way that managed to heap contempt on mere writers who get shot to pieces: he himself had been hit by machine-gun fire in Vietnam.

“Anyway, your sister tells me you haven’t taken monastic vows, either.” Conrad’s sister Camilla sits on the board of the same women’s shelter I do.

“You always did have a way with a phrase, Ms. W. Monastic vows. Nope, none of them.”