He was sitting next to my hospital bed, absorbed in reading something I couldn’t see. He was wearing a black zip-up hoodie, and he had several days’ worth of dark stubble on his jaw. He had a frown of concentration between his eyebrows, but when he heard me move it disappeared as he looked at me.
“The drugs are wearing off,” he said in a gentle voice.
They’d been wearing off for a while. I’d opened my eyes once before, though I had no idea how long ago. That time, no one had been in the room. I saw the empty coffee cup next to Michael and guessed why he’d been gone last time.
“I can’t move,” I said, my voice a croak.
Michael reached to a table out of my line of sight and brought a cup of water with a straw, putting the straw to my lips. “Your elbow is broken,” he said as I drank. “So is your knee. Two fractured ribs, the gash on your forehead got ten stitches, and you were halfway to hypothermia. Still you walked three miles. No one knows how you did it.”
Lily, I thought as I let the straw go. But no, that wasn’t right. Lily had been there somewhere as I walked, but she hadn’t done it for me. I’d done it myself.
Lily might have pushed me over the edge, but everything after that had been me.
“Your sister was here,” Michael said as he put the cup of water away. “She wanted to take leave from work, but I told her to go and I’d call her if you woke up. Which I’m going to do shortly.”
Esther would be worried. Really, really worried. What she wouldn’t know yet was that now, at what looked like my lowest point, it was finally time for her to stop worrying about me. “I have to tell you something,” I said to Michael.
“Yes, you do,” he said. He was calm, confident, and sure, concerned without being rattled, and I knew to my bones that I’d picked the right man. That he’d be what I needed him to be. “I hope it’s a story about how you fell over the cliff behind the Greer mansion and ended up in the ocean.”
“How did you know that’s where I went over?”
“Because Beth Greer says her motion sensors went off and you told her you were at her house.”
I felt my first pulse of trepidation. “Beth is here?”
Michael gave me a look. “Of course not. She called someone, though it wasn’t me, and told them. I heard it through official channels.”
That sounded like Beth: manipulating as much as she could without getting directly involved. I felt the fire of something burn deep in my belly. Revenge, maybe. “Listen,” I said to Michael.
He turned his dark eyes to me. “I’m listening.”
I took a breath, organizing my thoughts, and then I started. “When I was nine, I was walking home from school. A man pulled up beside me in his car.”
This wasn’t the story he was expecting. I saw a flicker of recognition cross his eyes, but he didn’t interrupt.
“He asked if I was cold, and then he told me my parents were waiting for me and he had to take me to them. He told me to get into his car, and I did.” I lay back against the pillows. The painkillers were definitely wearing off, and everything was starting to hurt, but I was used to pain now. I had to get this out before they gave me pills that put me to sleep again. “I knew something was wrong almost right away,” I told Michael. “It was a gut feeling, even though I was only a kid. We weren’t heading in the direction of my house. I asked if I could get out, and the man said no. Then he put his hand on my leg, trying to push it under my uniform skirt.”
There was silence in the room except for the busy murmur of the hospital outside. Michael looked tense, but still he didn’t interrupt, and again I knew I’d picked the right man. “I won’t go into details,” I said. “We struggled. He didn’t manage to sexually assault me, because he was still driving the car. He did hit me hard enough to make me bleed. The car slowed down and I got the door open. I jumped out and ran.”