“John?” Cole asked. “What’s going on?”
“I have to go.”
“Wait-”
Waters hung up and put the phone in his pocket. Blood pounded in his ears. What had Lily done? Whatever it was, she would have been trying to save her family…but how? Had she tried to kill Cole?
As the elevator rose, the nurse said, “You Mr. Waters?”
“Yes.”
She smiled broadly. “Your wife’s in four twenty-seven. People are already calling her the miracle patient.”
Waters forced himself to smile.
When the doors opened, he and Penn walked quickly past the nurse’s station. No one bothered to hide their stares. At the door to 427, Penn stopped.
“This may be the last time you talk to her for a day or two,” he said. “Make it count.”
“What do you mean?”
“Unless my instincts are wrong, Tom Jackson’s going to arrest you after this visit.”
“But-”
“He doesn’t have a choice, John. Don’t worry. If it happens, I’ll get bail set as fast as is humanly possible. Now get in there.”
Waters shook his lawyer’s hand, opened the door, then froze.
Annelise was sitting on the edge of Lily’s bed, playing with the IV tube running into her arm. Looking around for an explanation, he saw Lily’s mother sitting on the foldout chair against the wall. Evelyn did not look glad to see him.
“Hello?” said Waters.
Lily turned her head toward him, then smiled faintly. Both orbits of her eyes were badly bruised, and her face was abraded near the chin. A splint with pins immobilized her left wrist, which had pins in the bones.
“I know! Your mama’s tough, isn’t she?”
Ana laughed and looked at her mother with pride. With his heart still pounding, he walked to the bed and hugged his daughter, then looked deep into his wife’s eyes.
“They want to put Mom on TV!” Annelise said.
Lily groaned. “I don’t want to be on TV looking like this.”
Waters lifted Ana off the bed, set her on the floor, then knelt before her. “Honey, I need to talk to Mama alone for a minute.”
Ana’s face seemed to go flat. “How come?”
“We have to have a grown-up talk. It’ll just be a minute.”
“But how
He looked over at his mother-in-law. “Would you take her out for a minute, please?”
Evelyn looked to Lily, who nodded. Glaring at him, Evelyn got up and led Annelise out.
Waters hesitated before rising. He was almost afraid to look Lily in the face with no one else nearby. But when he stood and looked down at her, he saw the same exhausted face he had seen moments ago, the face of the woman he’d married. He felt relief until he remembered Mallory’s tearful performance outside Linton Hill on the day she had possessed Lily. Mallory could easily fool him. She could fool anyone.
He thought of asking Lily how she felt, but the question seemed silly. Instead, he dropped all pretense and asked the question foremost in his mind.
“Who are you?”
Lily looked up at him without blinking. “I’m me.”
“Are you?”
She nodded, then touched his hand. “I went to see Cole, John.”
“In the Stardust Motel?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She looked toward the window and the indifferent sky. “I thought about killing her. You know who I mean.”
“Mallory…But you didn’t. Cole’s downstairs.”
Lily didn’t say anything.
Waters’s throat knotted. “What happened then?”
“We had sex.”
Fear coiled in his belly. “Did he rape you?”
She looked back at him, her eyes free of deceit. “No. I gave myself to him. And Mallory came into me.”
Waters shut his mind against the reality of what had been required for this transition to occur. “Is she inside you now?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Who am I talking to now?”
She squeezed his hand. “I told you. Me. Lily.”
“Where’s Mallory?”
“Submerged. That’s how I think of it. Somewhere under the water of my consciousness.”
He shook his head, trying to follow her meaning. “What happened at the bridge?”
“I did that on purpose, John.” Her eyes fixed his with a startling intensity. “I drove the car off the bridge.”
He could not believe this. “You tried to commit suicide?”
“Yes.”
“I thought it was the only way I could stop her. The only way I could save you and Annelise.”
“Lily-”
“When it happened I thought it was spontaneous, but I realize now that I’d meant to do it all along. Kill myself, and Mallory with me.”
“You mean you knew you were going to kill yourself before you ever went to see Cole?”
“Yes and no. I knew, but I didn’t let myself know.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s like…sex when I was in college. I never went out on a date with the intention of having sex. But sometimes I had sex. And later-sometimes-I’d realize that I’d meant to do it all along. But I had to hide the intention from myself. You know? Because deep down, I thought premarital sex was wrong. I’d been conditioned that way.”
She looked at the ceiling as though watching a film being projected there. “The bridge was like that. If I had admitted to myself beforehand what I was going to do, Mallory would have known. She would never have let me drive up on that bridge.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because when I handcuffed myself to the wheel, she-”
Waters went pale. “You handcuffed yourself to the wheel?”
“Yes. With Eve’s handcuffs. When I went through the guardrail and off the bridge, and I knew there was nothing she could do to save herself, I was glad.”
“What happened when you hit the water?”
“I blacked out. When I came to, the car was floating but filling up with water. And then…Mallory tried to save herself. I only remember bits of it. For me it was like being trapped in a room with a strobe light. I could see for a second, then total blackness. I guess when I couldn’t see, she could. For some reason, the separation between us wasn’t as total as it had been before. Anyway, the car was sinking toward the front. Mallory was enraged. She hated me for outthinking her, and her hatred clouded her mind. She practically tore off my hand trying to get out of
