“No. I ran.”
“Where are you?”
“At Gram’s with Tucker.”
He let out a long exhale, amplified by the phone.
“I don’t know what to do,” Ava said. “If I drop out, I have to pretty much start over. And Cici just started giving me solo shoots.”
“I’ll handle it,” Marcus said.
Gram leaned forward. “What do you plan to do?”
“Confront her. Threaten legal action. Get a restraining order.”
I wrapped my arm around Ava’s waist. “Is that what you want?”
“I never want her in my life again,” she said. “Nomatter how many times my memory restarts, I never trust her. I never feel safe.”
“Good enough for me,” Marcus said. “Consider it done.”
We all stayed at Gram’s for a few nights to be safe. When the police didn’t find enough to go on for a restraining order, Marcus hired a lawyer to go before a judge with all of her history. It worked, and the paperwork was filed that if Geneva entered any of the places where Ava lived, studied, or worked, she would be arrested.
CHAPTER 35
Ava
Tucker and I thought we were so secure. Tucker’s VNS worked so well. My meds kept my seizures away. Once we had the legal protection against my mother in place, our situation felt manageable. We could live like other people.
But at my next doctor visit, everything changed.
Dr. Clark entered the room without his usual smile. He held a tablet in his arms, scrolling and tapping, frowning.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
He sat on the stool and looked at me with dark eyes filled with concern. “Ava, you’re a patient I think about a lot. Epilepsy is one thing. Memory loss is another.”
I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. “My medication has been working for over a year. Things have been good.”
“Remember when we talked about the blood test at your last visit? Why you had to do them?”
Unease curled in my belly the way a flower petal shrivels and dies. “I did the blood test.”
“And I have the results. We were looking for signs of liver damage. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s also not really rare. And it’s happening to you.”
Tucker stood up from his chair. “She has to switch medicines?”
Dr. Clark nodded solemnly. “She has to switch.”
It took a few seconds for my throat to loosen enough to speak. “Will the new one work?”
“It should. It uses a similar method of stopping seizures.” He patted my shoulder. “We’re going to be very conservative. We’ll have you on a full working dose before we wean you off the old one. Your liver isn’t going to be harmed immediately. We have time to change from one to the other.”
Tucker watched as Dr. Clark moved through the usual checks, finger touching, eye following, but we were distracted.
The moment we headed out of the office, he said, “We need to plan for a reset. Just in case.”
I agreed.
