‘Why, Delores? Why did you do it?’ Michael grabbed her by the wrists and held her hands up to her face. He showed Delores her own blood-soaked hands. The red trailed coldly between her fingers and down to her wrists.
His white shirt, normally so stiff and clean, was covered in blood too. Splashes of red against the white background, like a watercolor painting it spread along the material.
Delores shook her head, her mouth opening and closing, her soft hair falling around her face. Her brain banged painfully, almost agonisingly, a constant reminder of the alarm going off inside of her. ‘What? What did I do?’ she blinked, still staring wide-eyed and petrified at the blood covering her. Her body began to shake, her knees knocking almost comically.
Michael stared back at her hatefully. ‘You killed them, Del’,’ he snarled. ‘You killed them.’
“No,” she whispered on a breath as she slid back into sleep, haunted by memories of blood and death. “No.”
Chapter Thirty-Three.
Delores
“Her temperature is getting better,” a male voice lit up the darkness like a beacon.
“Okay,” Michael said.
“I still think that the best course of action, to bring her back from this—,”
“No!” Michael bit out angrily. “I’m not upsetting them anymore than they have been. The meds will kick in soon.”
“Well, it can take a couple of weeks for them to get in the system properly. Until then she’ll be—,”
“It’ll be fine,” Michael interrupted the doctor.
“Okay, well I’m still worried about her blood pressure. The damage was done by the tablets, but—hello, Delores?”
Delores blinked up into the aging face of a male doctor. He had a wrinkled face that was full of pleasantries, as if his face had been made for this job. It knew the drill, the smile to make, the softness to keep around the eyes to keep patients calm. His hair was a jostle of grey and white, salt and pepper hair her grandmother would have called it.
Delores blinked up at him groggily. Her mouth refused to smile, and her lips refused to part with a hello in return to the doctor. She glanced over briefly to Michael, but he refused to look at her, his gaze slipping around the room like an eel in water.
“I was just telling your husband—,” the doctor began.
Michael cleared his throat and tapped the doctor’s arm, he shook his head, his eyes warning the doctor to be quiet.Best to protect the crazy lady, Delores thought almost bitterly. In truth, she didn’t care about any of this anyway. It didn’t matter if she got better or didn’t. Nothing mattered anymore.
She looked away as the doctor nodded and then gestured for Michael to follow him outside. Michael patted her leg as he turned and followed after the doctor, and then she was alone again. Alone with her thoughts and her self-hatred.
She expected Michael to be angry with her. She couldn’t blame him, she would be angry too. He had given her a chance, a way to avoid dragging the children’s names through the news, and she had failed.
She was a failure.
‘I couldn’t even get my own death right,’ she thought bitterly.
She watched Michael through the window. He didn’t look in at her once. His hair was smoothed down, and he was calm and collected as always. His suit hadn’t fared well though, and neither had his shirt. Deep creases lined the front of the jacket, so much so she could see them as clear as day from her position.
The doctor turned and walked away and Michael finally looked in at her. She’d expected anger, and annoyance, even pity, but his expression was neither of these things. His expression wasn’t something she could understand. It made no sense. Just like all of this.
And then the expression vanished. Like a snap of the fingers, whatever he had been thinking and feeling was gone, replaced with ambivalence.
He opened the door and came back in. He walked to the bed, his footsteps tapping on the floor.Tap tap tap. She looked away from him, not wanting to look at his face anymore. She couldn’t see his face without seeing Owen, without knowing what she’d done to her beautiful boy with the unruly hair. It broke her heart into a thousand pieces. Crushed the pieces up like glass and threw them to the wind.
‘Be gone, cruel heart. Be gone.’
“I’m heading back to the hotel to get washed and changed,” he paused his eyes narrowing in on her face. “I need to eat,” he added as an afterthought.
“Okay,” she replied numbly, not sure else what to say to this man who was a stranger to her.
“I won’t be long. You’ll be okay,” he said, clearing his throat.
