I laugh and every cell in my body cries out in pain. “No, sorry, I wasn’t talking to you.”
Way to get yourself recommitted.
The man seems unalarmed. He leans forward so I can see his face. It’s Ben Marcus, only Ben Marcus with stubble and dark rings under his eyes. “Your daughter is okay,” he tells me. “You’ve been calling her name.”
“Where is she?” I ask.
“Billie Williams has been looking after her.”
I nod—realize that’s not a good idea—and lick my lips. I trust Billie to take care of Chloe, but the thought that I may never be able to take care of her myself terrifies me. “Am I . . . paralyzed?”
His eyes widen. “No! The firemen got an inflatable cushion in place before you jumped. You still broke three vertebrae, your right leg, and your shoulder. You’ll be in here for a while but you will recover. When you can sit up I’ll ask Billie to bring Chloe to see you.”
My face is wet again. Each sob sets off a ripple of pain and some beeping from a machine. A nurse comes in and adjusts something on my IV. I can feel myself sinking, but before I do I need to ask. “Sky? Peter?”
“Both dead. I’m sorry.” He squeezes my hand. The pressure of warm flesh sets off a mini quake in all my injured cells.
So, not paralyzed from the waist down either, I hear Laurel quip before I slip away again.
IT’S LIKE THAT for a spell of time that I later learn is three weeks: waking and sleeping, drifting on a sea of pain and drugs to curb the pain. Slowly I stay awake longer and make incremental progress. I sit up, I drink from a sippy cup, I form new words. I’ve become my own baby. Soon I’ll have to learn to walk.
Ben Marcus is there every day, his devotion a mystery I can’t begin to parse.
“We hardly know each other,” I say one day when he brings me grapes and a newspaper.
“You don’t know me but I know the woman who broke her own back to save her child. That’s enough to make me want to stick around and learn more, but if I’m being a pest . . .”
“You believed me when no one else did,” I say. “That’s enough for me to want to stick around and get to know you better.”
“Not that you have much choice,” he says.
We both laugh at the same time.
“Exactly,” I say.
TO DISTRACT ME as I begin physical therapy, Ben brings me news from the outside world. Stan Hobbes and Esta Greenberg have been arrested for aiding and abetting the murder of Laurel Hobbes. Although she was cremated, DNA has proven that I’m Daphne Marist so the police are going on the assumption that the woman found drowned in my bathtub was Laurel. They’ve also found Laurel’s journal on her laptop, which reveals she was planning to confront Peter at my house.
“Peter hated to be confronted,” I say.
“Apparently,” Ben answers. “What I don’t understand is why Laurel would take a drink from him.”
“Stan was already drugging her,” I say. “She must not have been thinking clearly—”
That’s sweet, Laurel says, but when are you going to start saying what you really think?
“—and she was kind of arrogant. She’d never suspect Peter would drug her, let alone kill her.”
Who would? Nerdy Peter Marist in his Izod golf shirts and Dockers? Besides, I thought I’d taken care of that.
“She changed her will,” I say, “so that Stan wouldn’t inherit when she died. She thought . . . she must have thought that would keep her safe. But maybe she didn’t get a chance to tell Peter that she’d changed it. He thought killing her was the best way of getting to her money. And then when he and Stan found out that she’d changed her will they realized they’d messed up.” I imagine how angry Stan would have been at Peter and how poorly Peter would have handled that. “The only way they could still access her money was if she were alive and crazy. And I played into their hands by running away to a mental institution.”
“Thank God you ran away,” Ben says. “Who knows what Peter would have done to you if he had found you there. The man’s clearly—”
But before he can finish what he’s saying, the nurse comes in to say it’s time for my PT. The exercises I do feel like I’m stabbing myself over and over again with steak knives, but right now that’s preferable to contemplating how stupid I’d been not to know I was living with a sociopath.
TRUE TO BEN’S promise, once I am well enough to sit up, Billie Williams brings Chloe to visit. She’s so big I barely recognize her, but she recognizes me. She greets me with an angry howl and then turns her head away from me, refusing to look at me.
“She’s angry that you’ve been gone, but don’t worry,” Billie says consolingly as she bounces Chloe on her knee, “once you’re back on your feet and able to take care of her she’ll come back to you.”
“Thank you,” I say, although I’m not sure I believe her, “and thank you for taking care of Chloe.”
Billie turns red. “It’s the least I could do after . . . well, after going along with Sky’s plan.”
I had wondered about that. “So you knew all along I wasn’t Laurel Hobbes?”
Billie nods and busies herself wiping some drool off Chloe’s chin. “She told me she’d found her lost baby and that he needed her help. I’ve always felt bad about the part I played in Sky losing her baby. If I hadn’t gone to Dr. Bennett that morning, Sky would have had a chance to decide for herself whether she wanted to keep the baby. Then when Peter came back into her life so many years later she seemed so thrilled that I didn’t want to say no when she asked me to help her. She said you weren’t in your right mind
