Sara feigned interest. “This is the Jane Doe you found in the office building?”
“No, another girl. Harding’s wife. Daughter. Maybe. We don’t know.”
Sara drank her scotch.
“I cut myself.” Instead of holding up his hand, he turned and showed her the back of his right leg. There was a dark patch of blood. “I slipped through some floorboards.” He waited. “There’s a couple of splinters.”
“If it’s been longer than six hours, it’s too late for sutures.”
Will waited.
Sara waited, too. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him. If he was going to break up with her, then he had to be a man about it.
He said, “Have you had much?” He paused. “To drink?”
“Not nearly enough.” Sara got up from the couch. She passed Will on her way into the kitchen. Her stomach wouldn’t like a second drink on top of the earlier glass of wine, but she poured herself one anyway.
Will stood on the other side of the counter. He watched her top off the glass. He had a physical aversion to alcohol. His shoulders squared. His chin lifted. She wasn’t even sure if he noticed. She had to assume it was muscle memory from all the drunks who had abused him when he was a child. As with most things, Will did not talk about it.
She asked, “Do you want one?”
He nodded. “Okay.”
Sara had seen him drink alcohol once, but that was under duress. She had forced a trickle of scotch down his throat because he couldn’t stop coughing.
He asked, “Do you have gin?”
She leaned down to search the cabinet, which, until tonight, hadn’t been opened for months. Dust covered the foiled corks in the wine. There was a full bottle of gin in the back, but something told her that gin was Angie’s drink, and Sara was not going to toast her boyfriend’s dead wife in her kitchen.
She stood up. “No gin. There’s wine in the fridge, or do you want scotch?”
“That’s what I had before?”
She took down a glass and poured him a double. When he didn’t move to take it, Sara slid the glass across the counter. He still didn’t take it.
She said, “Amanda told me not to tell you, but there was a note from Angie.”
The color drained from his face. “How did she . . . ?”
“You already knew?”
He opened his mouth again, but nothing came out.
Sara said, “I’m glad it’s out in the open. I wasn’t going to lie, or pretend that I didn’t know. That would make me the worst kind of hypocrite.”
“How—” He hesitated. “How does Amanda know?”
“She’s in charge of the investigation, Will. It’s her job to know everything.”
He spread his hands palms down on the counter. He wouldn’t look at her.
Sara thought back to the crime scene bus, Charlie’s glee when he’d shown her the glowing help me on the wall. Angie’s injuries had been severe, life threatening, but she had stopped to write the words in her own blood, knowing that Will would see them. That Sara would see them. That everyone would know that Angie would always have her claws in him. She might as well have written fuck you, sara linton.
Will asked, “Did you read it? The note?”
“Yes. I’m the one who recognized her handwriting.”
Will kept staring at his hands. “I’m sorry.”
“For what? You said it before: you can’t control her.”
“What she said . . .” His voice trailed off again. He sounded distraught. “It doesn’t matter. Not to me.”
Sara didn’t believe him. The fact of Angie’s death hadn’t yet sunk in. “It mattered to her. It’s probably the last thing she wrote before she died.”
He lifted the glass of scotch. He threw back the drink, and then he almost coughed it all back up.
Sara pulled a paper towel off the roll and handed it to him.
His eyes were watering. He wiped the mess off the counter. He was sweating. He looked shaken. And he should be. Angie was dead. She had begged him for help. He hadn’t been able to save her, not this time when it really mattered. Thirty years of his life was gone. He was probably in shock. Alcohol was the last thing he needed.
Sara took the glass away from him and put it in the sink. “Wait for me in your bathroom.” She didn’t give him time to respond. She found her glasses on the couch and walked down the hall to her office. She pulled down her medical bag from the closet shelf. She turned around.
She did not want to leave the room.
She stood by her desk, holding the bag, willing herself to calm down.
There was no way to fix this. She couldn’t stitch together their relationship like she could stitch together his leg. Talking around the problem was only delaying the inevitable. And yet she didn’t have it in her to confront him. She was frozen in place, terrified of what might come if they really talked about what had happened, what was coming next. Sara couldn’t guess the future. There was just a blank expanse of unknown. All she could do was stand in the darkened office listening to the blood rushing through her ears. She counted to fifty, then one hundred, and then she made herself move.
The hallway seemed longer than it ever had before. More like an arduous journey than a stroll. Will’s bathroom was in the spare bedroom. Sara had designated a separate area for Will for the benefit of their relationship. When she finally rounded the corner, he was waiting for her in the doorway.
She said, “Take off your pants.”
Will stared at her.
“It’s easier than trying to roll up your jeans.” She emptied her medical bag into the sink. She laid out the tools she would need. “Take off your pants. Take off your socks. Stand in the tub. I need to clean the wound.”
Will obeyed the orders, giving a slight wince when he peeled the jeans away from his leg. He had bled through the bandage, which was little more than an oversized Band-Aid. He stood in the tub.
“Take off the bandage.” Sara looked for a pair of gloves, then thought better of it. If Angie had given Will a disease, Sara already had it. She put on her glasses. “Turn sideways.”
Will turned. The leg was worse than she’d expected. This was more than a few splinters. He had a deep, two-and-a-half-inch laceration down the side of his calf. Debris had crusted into the blood. It was too late for sutures. She would be sewing in an infection.
She asked, “Did you wash it?”
“I tried in the shower, but it hurt.”
“This is going to hurt more.” Sara unwrapped the bottle of Betadine. She closed the toilet lid so she could sit down. She didn’t give him any warning before she blasted a steady stream of cold antiseptic directly into the wound.
Will grabbed the curtain rod, almost ripping it from the wall. He hissed air between his teeth.
“Okay?” she asked.
“Yep.”
Sara jetted out a chunk of debris. He’d done a poor job of cleaning the site. Caked blood dropped onto the white porcelain tub. Will lifted up onto his toes. He had braced his hands on the curtain rod and showerhead. His teeth were clenched. So much for the Hippocratic Oath. Sara had gone from being a caring doctor to a passive-aggressive bitch. She put down the bottle. Will’s leg was shaking. “Do you want me to numb you?”
He shook his head. His shirt had ridden up. He was holding his breath. She could see every single clenched muscle in his abdomen.
Sara felt the full weight of her transgression. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I mean, obviously, I did, but I—”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay, Will. It’s not okay.”
Her words echoed in the bathroom. She sounded angry. She was angry. Both of them knew that Sara wasn’t talking about his leg.
He said, “I know why Angie took your lipstick.”
Sara waited.
“She was trying to bully you. I should’ve stopped her.”
“How?” Sara genuinely wanted to know. “It’s like the note sh
e left for you on the wall at the club. She knew that Charlie or somebody would luminol the area. That I would see it. That it would be a public thing. She does what she wants to do.”
“The wall.” Will nodded, as if that explained everything. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Sara agreed, which brought them right back to where they had started.
She wet some gauze under the tub faucet and used it to wipe off the Betadine. Will eventually lowered his heel. She scooped warm water onto his leg and foot, rubbing away the iodine stain. She’d made a mess of everything. Even the hand towel she used to pat him dry showed streaks of yellow-brown from the antiseptic.
Sara told him, “The hard part’s over. I can still numb you. Some of the splinters are deep.”
“I’m fine.”
Sara took a flashlight out of the drawer. She found the tweezers from her bag. There were several tiny black splinters just below the surface of his skin. She counted three that were deeper, more like shards of wood. They would’ve been jabbing him every time he took a step.
She folded the hand towel and knelt on the tile floor so she could get at the splinters.
Will flinched before she touched him.
“Try to relax the muscle.”
“I’m trying.”
She made the offer again. “I have some lidocaine right here. It’s a tiny needle.”
“I’m fine.” His death grip on the curtain rod said otherwise.
This time, Sara tried to be gentle. As a pediatric intern, she’d spent hours sewing sutures onto peaches in order to train a softer touch into her hands. Still, there was no way to get around some types of hurt. Will remained stoic, even as she worked a piece of wood the size of a toothpick out of the open gash.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, because she hated the thought of hurting him. At least she hated it now. “This one is really deep.”
“It’s okay.” He allowed a breath but only so he could speak. “Just hurry.”
Sara tried to hurry, but it didn’t help that Will’s calf was a concrete block. She remembered the first time she’d seen him in running shorts. She’d felt a rush of heat at the sight of his lean, muscular legs. He ran five miles a day, five days a week. Most of the time, he took a detour to the local high school where he sprinted up and down the stadium steps. There were sculptures in Florence with less definition.
“Sara?”
She looked up at him.
“I could’ve gotten stronger locks for the doors. A Flip Guard. An alarm. I’m sorry I didn’t do that. It was disrespectful to you.”
Sara carefully worked out the last splinter. Now that he was talking about it, Sara didn’t want to have the conversation. She sat back on her heels. She put down the tweezers. She hooked her glasses on her collar. Will was standing in front of her in his boxers. His arms were still raised over his head. The alcohol inside of her suggested that there was an easy way to get them through the night.
Will said, “Everyone’s been telling me what it’s like to lose somebody.”
Sara reached into the sink for the bandage roll and some fresh gauze.
“Faith told me about her dad dying. Amanda told me about her mother. Did you know she hanged herself?”
Sara shook her head as she tied the bandage around Will’s leg.
“I’m just going to tell myself that Angie’s where she always goes when she leaves me. Wherever that is.”
Sara stood up. She washed her hands.
Will pulled on his jeans. “I think I’ll be okay if I can do that. Just tell myself that she’s not really gone. That way, when she doesn’t come back, it won’t matter. It’ll just be like all the times before.”
Sara turned off the water. There was a tremble in her hand, more like a vibration that was working through her body, as if a tuning fork had been touched to her nerves.
She asked, “Do you want to know what it was like when my husband died?”
He looked up from buttoning his jeans. Sara had told him the story, but not the details.
She said, “It felt like someone had reached inside of my chest and ripped out my heart.”
Will zipped his pants. His expression was blank. He really had no idea what Angie’s death was going to do to him.
She said, “I felt hollow. Like there was nothing inside of me. I wanted to kill myself. I did try to kill myself. Did you know that?”
Will looked stunned. She had told him about the pills, but not her intentions. “You said it was an accident.”
“I’m a doctor, Will. I knew what to do. Ambien. Hydrocodone. Tylenol.” Tears started to fall. Now that the words were coming out, she couldn’t stop them. “My mother found me. She called an ambulance, and they took me to the hospital and people I worked with, people I’ve known since I was a child, had to pump my stomach so that I wouldn’t die.” Her fists were clenched. She wanted to grab him and shake him and make him understand that death wasn’t the kind of thing you could just pretend away. “I begged them to let me go. I wanted to die. I loved him. He was my life. He was the center of my universe, and when he was gone, that was it. There was nothing left for me.”
Will slipped on his sneakers. He was listening, but he wasn’t hearing.
“Angie’s dead. Brutally murdered.” He didn’t flinch from her words. Four years ago, if someone had said the same thing about Jeffrey, Sara would’ve been on the floor. “She was the most important person in your life for thirty years. You can’t just tell yourself that she’s on a vacation, that she’s going to come back from the beach with a tan. That’s not how it works when you lose somebody. You see them on street corners. You hear their voice in the other room. You want to sleep all the time so you can dream about them. You don’t want to wash your clothes or your sheets so you can still smell them. I did this for three years, Will. Every single day for three years. I wasn’t living. I was going through the motions. I wanted to be just as dead as he was until—”
Sara caught herself at the last second.
“Until what?”
Her hand went to her throat. She felt like she was dangling over a cliff.
He repeated, “Until what?”
“Until enough time had passed.” Her pulse jumped under her fingers. She was angry. She was terrified. She was breathless from the rawness of her words and she was a coward for not telling him exactly what had turned her life around.
She just couldn’t do it.
She said, “You’re going to need time to grieve.” What she really meant was, You’re going to need time away from me, and I don’t think my heart can take it.
Will carefully lined up his socks. He folded them in two. “I know you can never love me the way that you loved him.”
Sara felt blindsided. “That’s not fair.”
“Maybe.” He tucked his socks into his back pocket. “I think I should go.”
“I think you should, too.” The words came unfiltered from her mouth. Sara recognized her voice. She just didn’t know why she had said it.
Will waited for her to step aside so he could pass.
She followed him into the living room. Her equilibrium was gone. Everything had shifted, but she couldn’t figure out how.
“I don’t know if I have a job anymore.” He was talking to her as if nothing had changed. “Even if I do, Amanda won’t let me near the case. Faith’s following up on the Palmer angle with Collier.” He scooped up Betty. “I’ll probably be stuck at my desk processing paperwork.”
Sara struggled for composure. “I won’t have the tox screen back on Harding for another week.”
“Probably doesn’t matter.” He took Betty’s leash off the hook and snapped it onto her collar. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”
He shut the door behind him.
Sara leaned against the wall for support. Her heart was battering her ribs. She felt light-headed.
What the hell had just happened?
Why had he left?
Why had she let him?
Sa
ra put her back to the wall. She slid down to the floor. She looked at her watch. It was still too late to call Tessa. Sara didn’t even know what she would say. Everything had escalated so quickly. Was Will having some sort of mental breakdown?
Was Sara?
She had said too much about Jeffrey. Sara had always walked a fine line with memories of her husband. She didn’t want to deny their time together, but she didn’t want to rub Will’s face in it, either. Did Will really think she was telling him that she couldn’t get over losing her husband? Four years ago, Sara would have believed that was true.
Until she’d met Will.
That was what she’d stopped herself from saying in the bathroom: that Will had changed everything. That he had made her want to live again. That he was her life, and the thought of losing him terrified her. The shame of her cowardice was equal to her regret. She had been scared because there was no point in telling him that she loved him if he was just going to leave.
Sara leaned her head back against the wall. She stared at the dark sky outside the windows. She’d seen death too many times to believe that there was such a thing as angels, but if there were demons in the afterlife, Angie Polaski was out there cackling like a witch.
That was the revelation that finally moved Sara; not love or need or even desperation, but the absolute conviction that she was not going to let Angie win.
Sara stood up. She found her purse. The dogs stirred, hoping for a walk, but she brushed them aside as she left the apartment. She didn’t bother with the lock. She pressed the elevator button. She pressed it again. She looked up at the lighted panel. The car was stuck on the lobby level. She turned toward the stairs.
Will was standing by her door.
Betty was beside him.
He asked, “What’s wrong?”
Of all the idiotic questions. “I thought you left.”
“I thought you wanted me to.”
“I only said that because you said it.” She shook her head. “I know that sounds stupid. It is stupid. Was stupid.” She wanted to reach for him. To hold him. To make the last ten minutes go away. “Why are you still here?”
“It’s a free country.”
“Will, please.”