When is it going tostop?
Where are my matches? I need… I need a hand wrapped around mine… Fingers stroking over my hair…
No. If they saw me like this?—
They’re so far away.
That last thought echoes away into the darkness.
The next thing I’m aware of is a now-familiar soft weight draped across my body to my shoulders, a similarly cozy pillow beneath my head.
I open my eyes cautiously. I’m lying on the bed in Other Elodie’s bedroom, tucked beneath the duvet. The gauzy canopy stretches across the frame above me, rippled with the faintest of creases.
“Elodie?”
Dad’s voice comes with a rasp, and then he’s jerking forward over the bed, clasping my shoulder and peering into my eyes. His face has gone taut, worry lines digging into the corners of his mouth. His tawny hair sticks up as if he hasn’t washed or even combed it in days. A faint tremor passes from his hand into me.
“How are you feeling, sunshine?” he asks, still raw with an edge of suppressed panic. “We finally got you home.”
I open my mouth. It tastes like sawdust.
The words creak up my throat. “I—I feel better than before.”
A smile that looks more frantic than pleased flashes across Dad’s face. “Oh, good. We were… We were pretty concerned for a while there, but everyone took such good care of you. You just take it easy. The doctors said you’ll need plenty of time to recover.”
He rubs my arm, still studying me as if searching for a promise that I’ll never be sick again. A lump fills my throat.
I’m not even the daughter he’s so afraid to lose. She’s already gone.
“Anything you need, I’ll be right here,” he says. “You just let me know.”
One anxious thought pierces the muddle in my head. “Did they—did they catch the person who did it?”
The lucent medical staff must have figured out I wasn’t simply down with food poisoning, because Dad doesn’t show any surprise at the idea of someone causing my illness. His eyes turn stormy. “Not yet. I won’t let up until they figure it out. We’re going to keep you perfectly safe from now on.”
I tamp down a laugh at the absurdity of that statement. When I squirm under the covers, a renewed lance of pain shoots through my abdomen.
At my wince, Dad stiffens. “Are you all right? If you start to feel worse again, we can head right back to the hospital. It won’t?—”
I reach up to squeeze his hand, cutting through his hurried babble. “It’s okay. I just shouldn’t move much yet, I guess.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.” And I’m just as sure that if he keeps looking at me like that, like his whole world is on the verge of ending if I’m in pain, it’s going to drive me mad. “Maybe I should try to get some more sleep.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I won’t keep you from getting your rest.”
Dad grips my shoulder for a moment longer as if he’s afraid of letting me go and then stands up. He points at the phone sitting on the bedside table. “I’ll be home. Just a shout or a text away if you need me.”
“I know.”
When he slips out with a click of the door behind him, I do close my eyes, but it’s not exhaustion I’m feeling. The lump in my throat burns almost as horribly as the toxin did. Every other part of me is tangled up with guilt and a looming sense of hopelessness.
Whoever murdered my doppelganger made another attempt. I still have no idea who that is. I can’t even tell which of my various threads of investigation prompted them to act.
If they hadn’t used one of the few poisons I’m familiar with the flavor of… If I hadn’t recognized it quite so quickly…I’dbe dead now too.
I have no glim to save me here, whether I’d want it to or not.
