This Story Might Save Your Life(80)

I expect Dr. Singler thought I left my husband because I was pregnant. To protect myself. To protect the baby. And I did. But at the same time, if he’d known I was pregnant, he would never have lost his temper. He would have wrapped me in his arms and whispered every promise under the sun. He would have been good. And if the worst happened, he would have shielded me from the outside world, and he would have let me wallow, and we would have wallowed together, while also drifting further apart.

“You have choices,” Dr. Singler said, and I laughed through my tears because this wasn’t a choice. I didn’t choose this. Xander did. And now he’s dead.





Benny Abbott


Day Six

I’ve been pacing the Glendale Memorial waiting room for six hours when Keller finally returns my call.

“I got your messages,” she says. I hear voices in the background, the slamming of a car door.

I gesture for Sarah to follow me into an empty beige-tiled hallway beside the elevators and put Keller on speaker. “So will you question them again? Ted and Emil?”

“Where are you right now?”

“The hospital.” Technically, the ER. I glance down at my fingers, stretched to the point of shininess, like greasy cooked sausages. “I may have broken my hand.”

“Your hand.” She doesn’t sound surprised. “Why were you at Joy’s house last night?”

I haven’t mentioned the surveillance camera yet, nor will I until I’m reunited with a working SD card reader. I brought one with me but my laptop rejected it on the way to the ER, and Sarah refused to turn around. “I was just grabbing something for Potsie,” I lie. “Did you talk to Ted and Emil?”

“I did, yes.”

“And? What did they say?”

The line dampens, like she’s covered the microphone. A muffled conversation ensues. Sarah hugs herself, back pressed to the wall.

“Detective?”

“I’m gonna have to call you back.” The line goes flat.

The elevator dings and a man pushing an empty wheelchair steps out. He nods at me and then quickly turns away, as if embarrassed. I wonder what I must look like. Sarah continues hugging herself, but I can see the gears shifting behind her eyes.

I’m about to ask what she’s thinking when a nurse steps into the hallway. “Abbott?”



* * *



“HOW’D THE OTHER guy fare?” the technician asks as he coaxes my hand into a semi-flat position on the X-ray table.

I don’t respond. The pain is so intense I can hardly breathe.

“Hold that pose,” he says, going behind a wall.

The doctor, an older man with voluminous ear hair, meets me in the examination room an hour later. I’ve fractured the fifth metacarpal bone but I won’t need surgery. Ice, pain medication, splinting, rest. “Never hit hard on hard,” he says. “Only hard on soft or soft on hard.” He narrows his eyes beneath bushy brows, giving me a not-so-subtle once-over. “Better yet, don’t hit anything at all.”

“I didn’t…” I start, but it’s not worth it. I stare at his ear hair and thank him for his wisdom. Soon Sarah and I are back in her car.

Sarah relies on the navigation app instead of asking for directions, and we’re quiet for most of the drive. Only as we climb the hill into Mount Washington does she break the silence. “I get that everything is terrible right now, but I have to tell you—it isn’t healthy the way you’re coping.”

“I know, I know. I’ll take a nap when I get home.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

I regard my sister from the corner of my eye. “Then what do you mean?”

“This is coming from a place of love, okay? I just think we should talk about it before things go any further.”

She chews at a fingernail, and I wonder if she’s about to ask something delicately preposterous, like whether I might have, possibly, forgotten to mention that I murdered Xander. I wait until I can no longer stand it. “Spit it out.”

“You really scared me last night.”

I glance away, out my window at the passing houses. Halloween is in full force now, yards peppered with ghastly ghouls and pumpkins and tombstones. “You can put Dr. Sarah away now. It was just a bad night.”

“A bad night is food poisoning. It’s sitting on hold with your internet provider for four hours because your router stopped working. It is not landing yourself in the hospital with a broken hand because you picked a fight with your neighbor.”

“Are you serious? You were there. You know I didn’t start it.”

“I know things got tense. That part wasn’t on you. But let’s remember the sequence of events, Benny. No one laid hands on anyone until you grabbed Ted’s camera.”

A hundred snarky responses come to mind, but what I say instead is, “What would you have done? There’s no handbook for this. What would you be doing if you were me?”

“Do you want Dr. Sarah or not? Is this the Joe Schmoe question again? Because I have a better answer this time.”

I exhale. “Fine.”

“All right, Joe. If you were my client, I would remind you that some things are out of your control. And because you’re probably blaming yourself for this, just as you did with your mother’s death, I would sternly remind you that you are not at fault now, just as you weren’t at fault then. And even though—”