I say nothing. A headache begins just then, inching up the nape of my neck, stabbing me between the eyes. I clench my eyes shut tight, pressing my fingertips to my temples to dull the pain. I must experience a drop in blood pressure because all at once, it’s hard to hear. Officer Berg is talking, asking if I’m okay. But the words are more muffled than they were before. I’m underwater.
A door opens and then closes. Officer Berg is speaking to someone else. They found nothing. But they’re conducting a search of my home because Will has given them permission to do so.
“Dr. Foust? Dr. Foust?”
A hand shakes my shoulder.
When my eyes open up, some old guy’s looking at me. He’s practically drooling. I glance at the clock. I look down at my shirt. A blue button-down pajama shirt buttoned all the way up, making me gag. I can barely breathe. She can be such a prig sometimes. I unbutton the top three buttons, let in a little air. “It’s fucking hot in here,” I say, fanning myself, seeing the way he looks at my clavicle.
“Everything all right?” he asks. He’s got one of those looks on his face, like he’s confused about what he sees. His eyebrows are all scrunched up. He digs the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, makes sure he isn’t seeing things. He asks again if I’m all right. I think I should ask if he’s all right—he seems to be in far more distress than me—but I don’t so much care if he is. So I don’t ask.
Instead I ask, “Why wouldn’t everything be all right?”
“You seem, I don’t know, disoriented somehow. You’re feeling okay? I can fetch you some water, if you don’t want your coffee.”
I look at the cup before me. It’s not mine.
He just looks at me, saying nothing, staring. I say, “Sure,” about the water. I twirl a strand of hair around my finger, taking in the room around me. Cold, bland, a table, four walls. There’s not much to it, nothing to look at, nothing to tell me where I am. Nothing except for this guy before me, fully decked out in a uniform. Clearly a cop.
And then I see the pictures on the table beside me.
“Go on,” I tell him. “Fetch me some water.”
He goes and comes back again. He gives me the water, sets it on the table in front of me. “So tell me,” he says. “Tell me what happened when you took the dogs for a walk.”
“What dogs?” I ask. I’ve always liked dogs. People I hate, but I’m quite fond of dogs.
“Your dogs, Dr. Foust.”
I get a great big belly laugh out of that. It’s preposterous, ludicrous, him mistaking me for Sadie. It’s insulting more than anything. We look nothing alike. Different-color hair, eyes, a heck of an age gap. Sadie is old. I’m not. Is he so blind he can’t see that?
“Please,” I say, tucking a strand of hair behind an ear. “Don’t insult me.”
He does a double take, asks, “Pardon me?”
“I said don’t insult me.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Foust. I—”But I stop him there because I can’t stand the way he keeps referring to me asSadie, asDr. Foust. Sadie would be lucky to be me. But Sadie is not me.
“Stop calling me that,”I snap.
“You don’t want me to call you Dr. Foust?”
“No,” I tell him.
“Well, what should I call you, then?” he asks. “Would you prefer that I call you Sadie?”
“No!” I shake my head, insistent, indignant. I tell him, “You should call me by my name.”
His eyes narrow, homing in on me. “I thought Sadie was your name. Sadie Foust.”
“You thought wrong, then, didn’t you?”
He looks at me, words slack as he asks, “If not Sadie, then who are you?”
I stick a hand out to him, tell him my name is Camille. His hand is cold when he shakes it, limp. He looks around the room as he does, asks where Sadie went.
I tell him, “Sadie isn’t here right now. She had to go.”
