“No!” I cry. “I didn’t.”
He grunts. “Yeah, right.”
Holding the phone in one hand, he grabs my left arm again to look at Harry’s number. I squirm, trying to get loose, but his grip is like a vise. With his thumb, he types the number into the phone then hits the button to make the call. I watch him, my heart pounding. He waits long enough that I’m certain the call has gone to voicemail.
“Hey, Harry?” Graham shoots me a look as he says my ex-fiancé’s name. “I found your phone number written on Tess’s arm. I’d really appreciate it if you would leave her the fuck alone from now on. Or else. We don’t need you in our lives. And I swear to God, if you bother her again, you are going to live to regret it. You get me?”
He ends the call, his eyes still locked with mine. At first, it looks like he’s going to toss my phone back on the table, but instead, he puts it in his pocket. “You’re not getting this back. Ever. I’m sick of this shit.”
“Okay,” I say in a small voice.
His shoulders rise and fall as he takes a breath. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Losing his temper isn’t the worst thing he has done tonight. He tried to drug me, for God’s sake.
“Listen.” His voice is calmer now. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I have no clue what Harry has been saying to you. I can only imagine. But whatever it is, it’s not true. He doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“Right,” I mumble. All I can think of is that I escaped drinking that water. By tomorrow, I’ll remember everything. And I can work on getting free from this monster.
“Tess, look at me.”
I lift my eyes to meet his. All the anger from a moment ago has vanished. “What?”
“I’m not trying to drug you. You have to believe me. I would never do anything to hurt you.”
I shake my head. “So what was in that drink? I saw something.”
He rubs at the back of his neck. “You’re right. There was something dissolved in that drink. But it wasn’t anything bad. It was your medications, Tess. Prescribed by the doctor you see for your head injury.”
“What medications?”
“For your seizures.” He tugs at the hem of his T-shirt. “You were getting horrible seizures after your accident. Your whole body would shake, and you hit your head twice when it happened. One of the times you hit your head, the bleeding in your brain got worse. You need to be on your seizure medications.” He frowns. “But lately, you’ve been refusing to take them because you think I’m drugging you for some reason. So I started putting them in your drink. I’m sorry. I didn’t do it to upset you. I just thought it would be easier this way.”
I think of the ominous message I found scribbled on my thigh this morning. “I don’t believe you.”
“Fine. Do you want me to show you?”
Before I can answer, Graham gestures at me to follow him, and he leads me down the hallway to the downstairs bathroom. If this is a game of chicken, he’s playing it very well. He opens the medicine cabinet and pulls out two orange pill bottles.
“These are your seizure medications,” he says. “We have you on once-a-day medications because getting you to take them in the morning was impossible. I mean, I don’t blame you. You usually have no idea what’s going on in the morning, and you’re not eager to swallow a bunch of pills.”
I take the bottle of pills from him. My name and the name of the drug are written on the bottle and underneath in smaller letters, “FOR SEIZURES.” There’s a doctor’s name and prescribing number.
“You can call the pharmacy if you want,” he says. “I’m telling you the truth. And here…” He takes his phone out of his pocket, types something in, then hands it to me. It’s the website from Mt. Sinai with a photograph of the doctor whose name is on my prescription bottle. Dr. Leonard Sawinski. “That’s your neurologist. He’s not a quack. He’s the chairman of the whole department.”
I look in the bottle of pills. It’s about half full of large capsules. They would be easy to break open and pour into a glass of water.
“They make you pretty groggy though,” he says apologetically. “Usually you just want to go straight to sleep after you’ve had them. But sometimes you realize I slipped you something and freak out.”