The Ones She Sat With

Elliot Marsh disappears into whoever he writes. His new subject is Delsia Angel, a hospice nurse the papers call an angel of mercy, on death row for three patient murders. Elliot has until her execution in late summer to finish her memoir.

Delsia is warm and observant, and almost impossible not to believe. Her memoir is full of frightened families and the patients whose hands she held through their final hours. Yet every story leads back to the same place: the exact moment a life ended.

Then Elliot finds the chart behind one of her warmest stories. The woman in it was getting better and due to go home. Suddenly Delsia’s version of mercy sounds too polished. As Elliot replays the sessions night after night, the calm he needs to write her begins settling into him. Soon Elliot must choose: write each death as Delsia tells it and print a killer’s lie as mercy, or set that chart against her and break the angel a whole town still holds vigils for.

She sat with the dying. Now she has chosen someone to sit with her at the end.