I don't text back.
I sit in the dark with the empty bottle and the phone and the search results and the headache and the nausea and the fact that everything I believed about my life just cracked down the middle.
The tapping starts again. My finger against the pill bottle. Slow. The rhythm of a woman who is about to ask questions that will tear her life apart.
Chapter Thirteen: Carmelo
Shedoesn'ttextback.
I sit at the window for three hours watching her apartment. The light stays on past two AM. Past three. At three twenty-two, the light goes off so I put the phone down and clean my nails in the dark and think about what she's doing in there. Sleeping, maybe. Or lying in bed with her eyes open and the empty pill bottle on the nightstand and questions building in her gut.
She didn't text back. Grace texts back. Grace responds. Grace is a woman who shows up and functions and communicates because that's what she's built her life around, the steady maintenance of being present and reliable and okay. If she didn't text back, something shifted.
I know what shifted. I'm just not ready to face it yet.
At six AM I call Danila. He picks up on the fourth ring, groggy, a different time zone.
"The pharmacy on the label," I say. "Pemberton Family Pharmacy."
"What about it?"
"Is it traceable?"
"It's a shell. Fake name, fake address. The network uses rotating pharmacy labels for the prescriptions. Different name every few years. Why?"
"If someone searched for it. Googled the name, looked up the address. Would they find anything?"
Danila is quiet for three seconds. "They'd find a parking garage."
Fuck.
"She searched it," Danila says. Not a question.
"I think so. I haven’t checked the clone, but I’d bet if I did, she did."
"Then she knows the pharmacy isn't real. And if she knows the pharmacy isn't real, she's going to start asking what the pills actually are." He pauses. "How much does she know?"
"She knows the pills weren't for anxiety. She had a flashback during sex last night. She spoke Italian. She doesn't remember doing it, but she heard herself."
"Oh… fuuuuuuck."
"I know."
"The withdrawal is ahead of schedule. If she's having full-scene fragments and involuntary language recall on day one without the pills, the floodgate is going to open faster than we thought. Days, not weeks."
"I know."
"You need to tell her."
"I know."
"Today."
"I'll tell her what she needs to hear."
"That's not the same thing as telling her the truth."
"It's what I have."
