I can practically hear Evelyn rolling her eyes. If I were able, I’d roll mine, too. “Not this nonsense again.”
“If you’d just supported me to begin with, I wouldn’t have had to move here with you.”
“You begged me to help you meetGeorgia Blue. You said you had something useful to offer.”
“Idid! I still can!”
“We can’t afford this.” There’s desperation in Evelyn’s voice. “She’s supposed to be our success story! Callie already started leaking items to the press.”
Despite the drugs coursing through my body, rage bubbles up at the sound of Callie’s name. All the drugs in the world couldn’t dull that anger.
“What do we do?” Andrew sounds panicked. “I could get sent to jail!”
“We’ll say she was trying to hurt you.” I can tell Evelyn’s trying to sound rational, but she’s too drunk to pull it off. “No one would trust her word over ours.”
What’s more believable than a woman with anger issues losing her temper?
“No.” Andrew’s voice cracks. “I gave her too much. Her breathing—”
At once, I understand: Andrew thinks he killed me. He’s not worried that I’ll tell my side of the story. He’s worried that I’ll never tell anyone anything ever again.
“Don’t worry,” Evelyn says. “I’ll take care of it.”
For maybe the first time, I feel something like aconnectionwith Evelyn.
In fact, this is the least I’ve ever hated her.
She’s willing to do anything to protect her child.
55Lord Edward
Once I’m certain Dr. Rush and his colleague are gone, I limp toward the stairs, my leg aching horribly. I think about everything I vomited up a few nights ago, and I’m tempted to go back to my room, see if any detritus remains in the toilet.
Good lord, I’m considering licking the fucking toilet bowl.
I hold the railing and hop down the stairs on my right leg. Before he stamped out his cigarette, Dr. Rush said they were looking for a patient named Sonja Carrera, here for digital detox. I cross the courtyard and make my way to Amelia’s room. As I suspected, she’s already gone.
I think I know where she went: the house on the edge of the property. I start walking toward it, avoiding the beams of searching flashlights, trying to breathe through the pain like they say in PT, but my mouth fills with wind and snowflakes, the cold as sharp as a knife.
And then, I lose my footing. I fall to the ground, on my back like a turtle that’s been flipped over.
At once, I’m back in the hospital, lying flat on a gurney. I’m shouting Harper’s name, or maybe I’m just thinking it because I’m too weak to shout. Around me, the doctors are frantic. They say I’ve lost too much blood. They don’t tell me how Harper is. Later, I learned that they drove us in separate ambulances—me first—and I don’t know if I was first because my situation was more dire or because the EMTs recognized me.
All I know, at the time, is that something is wound around my left thigh, so tight that I can’t feel my foot, can’t feel my knee. God, it hurts. I manage to reach down, try to undo what they’ve done, trying to free my leg. Someone shouts, and then they’re sticking me with needles, holding me down, securing me with restraints. Later, I’ll be told that I tried to untie thetourniquet on my left leg. If I’d succeeded, I would’ve bled out in a matter of moments.
When I woke after surgery, I asked to see Harper. They said I wasn’t family; therefore I wasn’t allowed into the ICU. I said she was my fiancée. Someone lifted my body onto a wheelchair, covered me with blankets.
At first, I didn’t recognize her: There were tubes in her mouth, her nose, an IV dripping something into her arm. They told me she was in a coma. I didn’t know if she would want me there, and part of me was relieved she couldn’t ask me to go away. I was selfish enough to stay becauseIwanted to be there.
I was still beside her when her parents arrived. They told the nurses we weren’t engaged. We would never be engaged. Their daughter wouldn’t marry me, the man who’d nearly killed her.
Someone wheeled me out of the ICU. It was only when I was back in my room, when they lifted me out of my chair and into the bed, that I realized my leg, just below the knee, was gone. Maybe someone had already told me, but I didn’t remember. All I remembered was needing to get to Harper, to see that she was all right, and then the agony of knowing she wasn’t.
It’s cold on the ground. The snowflakes are fat and wet now, the sort of heavy snow that turns to sludge. My jeans are damp. I read once that hypothermia feels like falling asleep. The worse it gets, the less cold one feels. Apparently, it’s quite comfortable to freeze to death.
I close my eyes. It’s peaceful here.
56Amelia Blue
