Elijah slowly climbed off the bed, his own body shaking with stress and anxiety. Confusion gave way to anger and frustration. He looked towards the door and then back to Delores, who was now kneeling on the bed with her head in her hands, hot tears falling through her fingers like raindrops as she rocked her thin body backwards and forwards.
He needed to go before someone came.
He needed to speak to Paul.
He needed to work out what the hell was going on.
He needed air and space, and an explanation for why the hell this was in her head.
She was wrong, he knew that she was wrong. But when he looked at her, he couldn’t imagine that she was. Her grief was too real, her pain too blinding. Surely the doctors would have told her by now that she hadn’t harmed her children. Surely Michael would have said something to her. Surely someone would have helped her to understand that none of this was real.
Unless somehow it was, he thought with leaden dread. Had something happened to the children after she’d left? Michael would have reported it…
She let out a scream. It sounded like death.
She let out another as she gripped her hair and pulled and pulled.
“I’ll be back, Delores, I promise, I’ll come back.” He backed up to the door, hating having to leave her like this, but needing to go before someone came. If Michael found him here, he’d no doubt try to have him arrested and then Elijah would have no chance of sorting out any of this. Because he had to sort this out. He had to help her somehow, some way.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Delores continued to mumble to herself as Elijah pulled open the door and looked into the hallway.
He looked back once, his heart aching for Delores and what she must be going through right now. She gripped her own arms, her nails digging into the soft skin on her forearms, hard enough to draw blood. He couldn’t look anymore. He needed to breathe for a moment to catch his runaway thoughts, to stop the humming in his fucking head.
Elijah looked away from her and left the room, shutting the door behind him and blocking out her cries. He ran down the corridor, passing nurses rushing to Delores’s room, needles in hand ready to sedate her. He took the stairs again, making sure once again that he didn’t bump into anyone. He didn’t stop walking until he reached his car and got inside it.
Safely in his car, Elijah allowed himself to fall apart as he stared up at the imposing hospital building and the tiny black windows that ominously stared down at him. He pulled out his cell phone, intending to phone Paul straight away and ask him what the hell was going on, but he found that his hands were shaking too much for him to dial. His heart filled with too much dread to call. So he put the cell on the dashboard and dragged his hands down his face, trying to erase the image of a broken Delores from his mind.
That woman wasn’t the Delores he knew.
That was an imposter.
A fake interpretation of the woman he loved.
She was a fraud.
He’d always known that she could get sick,really sick; she’d warned him, but to see her so broken and so lost, so confused about what was real and wasn’t, it frightened him. It confused him. He’d thought that he knew Michael and all that he stood for, but after seeing Delores as she was, he realised his mistake.
Though he could never condone it, and his hatred for Delores’s husband still burned bright, things made more sense to Elijah now. Michael made more sense now. Because if this was Delores’s reality, what kind of hell must Michael and those kids have been living in?
Deep down, Elijah began to wonder if he could cope with Delores as she was; if this was how she could be when her illness flared up, Elijah felt seriously unprepared for that. He had been a caretaker in some way or another for most of his life—whether it be for his alcoholic father or his mother dying of breast cancer—but Delores’s illness was something different altogether.
He hated that he’d begun to doubt whether he would be okay looking after Delores after all, but seeing her so broken, so delusional about what was going on, how could he think any other way?
Chapter Thirty-One.
Elijah
Elijah headed back to his motel room, his emotions running at high speed.
The feelings were new to him. He’d never been an overly-emotional man; a man in his job position couldn’t afford to be. He needed to look at facts, not feelings. Feelings made you weak. They made you make mistakes.
This knowledge wasn’t new to him. It was a lesson he’d been learning his whole life. A wall he had built around himself, to keep others out. To protect his heart.
Until her.
Elijah pulled up outside of the motel and kept the engine running as he stared up at the sand colored two-story building. He’d left his curtains shut when he’d left and a do not disturb sign on the door. He had no idea where Michael was staying, and though he doubted that it would be in anything as cheap as this, he wasn’t about to take any chances.
Elijah glanced at his cell phone on the dashboard of his car. The small black cell almost mocked him. He hadn’t had the courage to phone Paul yet, not daring to find out the truth that Delores had killed her children.
