Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Hartley clears his throat. “Do you need a minute?”
“No.” If I stop moving I will rot. “Bring him.”
He disappears. I try to slow my breath the way Sawyer taught me—four in, four out—but all I can hear is the rush of a van’s engine and all I can see is a white rectangle of sky framed by cargo doors.
I twist the hospital bracelet on my wrist until the plastic bites. The ink bleeds: KINGSLEY, CAMILLE— as if I needed reminding who I am.
The curtain rattles. My father steps in with Hartley. He looks smaller in fluorescent light, his hair mussed, tie loose, eyes rimmed in sleepless red. He stops six feet from the bed like it’s the edge of a cliff.
“Pumpkin.” His voice breaks on the word.
I nearly laugh because it’s so wildly wrong and tender and infuriating I could scream. “Did you text me,” I ask, calm as the moment before a shatter, “to meet you in the south garden?”
He blinks. “No,” he says quickly. “No, sweetheart, I would never—”
“But you set the stage where a text like that would feel normal.” The calm peels away. “You hired a company to scare me so Wall Street would clap for you.”
He flinches like I slapped him. “Who told you—”
“I didn’t hear it from the gossip rags, Dad,” I spit. “I heard it from the man who found me tied like a package in a storage unit. So—answer me. Did you?”
His mouth opens. Closes. He looks at Hartley like the detective might throw him a rope. Hartley’s face is granite. My father looks back at me. “I thought it would be controlled,” he says, words spilling, desperate. “No one was supposed to touch you. I pulled out when it went too far—”
“But only after it started.” My hands shake. “Only after you lit the fuse.”
He presses his fingers to his eyes and for a second I see the man who taught me to ride a bike and bled with me when I fell. “I’m sorry,” he says into his palm. He drops his hand and the CEO returns for a beat. “I will fix it. I will make him pay.”
“Which him?” I ask. My voice has turned wrong. It’s the calm before the final storm, the eye. “The man you paid to light a fake fire? The partner who threw gas? Or the one who used me as kindling?”
He sways. “All of them.”
I inhale like I’m drawing air through a straw in tar. “Get out.” The words arrive before I know they exist. They surprise me. They fit.
“Camille—”
“Get. Out.” I point at the curtain because I have to point at something that isn’t his face. “I can’t—” My throat closes around how much I can’t. “Hartley can take your statement in the hallway or in hell; I don’t care where. I will talk to you when I can hear myself think without hearing the van doors.”
Hartley moves him gently by the elbow. Gregory lets himself be steered, stunned and gray. At the curtain he turns back. “I love you,” he says, and I want to throw the heart monitor at him because that word feels like counterfeit currency he used in a place that only takes cash.
They’re gone. The room fills with fluorescent and beeping and that lemon-bleach again like a stupid hymn.
I fold in on myself. Not a ball, because my hip aches and the IV tubing tethers me, but some smaller shape. I drag the warm blanket up and it smells like a hundred other people who were scared here before me. It doesn’t help. I bury my face in it and breathe until breaths stop clawing.
Through the thin curtain I hear low voices—Hartley, clinical and inexorable; my father, smaller and smaller. Somewhere, a door opens. Somewhere, a pen scratches ruin onto paper.
I think of Sawyer in the hallway. I think of the way his eyes softened when he said always and the way they hardened when he said we finish it. I think of the sticky note I pinned to his chest—trust your gut—and wonder if I can obey my own handwriting when my gut is an ocean churning.
A soft shadow falls across the curtain. “It’s just me,” comes his voice, low and careful.
“Go away,” I say, because love is a thing with edges and mine is flayed to ribbons. “Please.”
A beat. “I’ll be right outside,” he says.
“I know.” It isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t anything yet. It’s just a fact. He leaves footsteps in air where there should be floor.
I stare at my paint-stained cuticles. They look like somebody else’s hands, somebody else’s life. I flex them, feeling tender skin pull. Color can’t cover blood. I know that now. But maybe, when the blood dries, color can make a map. Later. Not yet.
For now, I lie under the hospital light and let the ache expand until it’s as big as the sky. I let the truth sit, sour and heavy, because it’s better than the lie that almost killed me. I let myself hate and love the same two men in different measures that change with every beep.