Chapter 15 #2
“Hannah and I were talking last night,” the other man said, “and we’d really love to lend you our spare vehicle.
It’s a beater and we were planning to give it to our boy when he got his license, but he’s okay with us lending it to you.
No rush to return it. Joseph isn’t planning to sit his learner license test until after he finishes up the school year, and then he has to take driving lessons. ”
The generosity made my hands clench on the balcony railing. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. And if you need a place to stay, we have a spare room.”
I couldn’t stand the idea of being stuck with people who’d be watching me with sympathetic eyes the entire time. And if worse came to worst, and Ackerson didn’t drop her suspicions, they’d start to look at me with fear or judgment or prurient curiosity instead.
I’d been through it all before.
“Thank you,” I said, “but I found a place near the hospital.” The nightly fee was one I could afford even with my depleted accessible account, and the family-owned motel was clean and well maintained.
If I did run out of funds, I’d ask my father to transfer me some money.
He’d send it, no questions asked, but only up to a point, so I had to be careful with my spending.
Because behind closed doors, feared attorney Anand Advani answered to his wife, any money he sent me coming out of his assigned “personal” funds.
The rest went into Anand and Audrey’s joint account.
And Audrey would burst a vein at the idea of giving her second son a single red cent.
Which was why I’d stolen it. Slowly, and with infinite care, over a period of years, until I had a seven-figure sum sitting in that offshore account.
I’d also managed to hang on to it through sheer spite even as I flushed the rest of my money down an endless black hole.
Because it had mattered that I have the money, Audrey’s money.
A revenge I’d told myself was ice-cold but that had been born in a child’s anguish.
Now that emotion-fueled decision could hang me if it came to light.
It won’t, I told myself. She doesn’t have a clue, will never have a clue. That’s the whole point. To make a fool out of her in front of her face and laugh over her grave when she dies.
Yes, I had a shit ton of mommy issues.
“Oh right, it makes sense you’d want to be close to Diya and Shumi.” Tim’s smile was open, his eyes searching. “Will you have breakfast with us?”
“No, but thank you.” All at once, I didn’t want to be near the house, the smell of soot and fire in my every breath. “If you’re sure about the car?”
“Of course. Let me get the keys.”
The car wasn’t as much of a beater as he’d made it out to be—a small gray sedan, it started straightaway and only had a couple of minor dings in the door.
It was a few years old, with knobs and dials for the temperature and other controls, and a radio with a limited bandwidth, but it’d get me where I needed to go.
After thanking Tim one more time, I drove out to the nearest mall to grab the charger I needed, along with a second pair of jeans, a pack of socks, extra boxer briefs, and a stick of deodorant.
The last thing I wanted to do was stink of sweat while talking to Ackerson or the other cops; they’d take it as a sign of guilt.
Dumping everything in the trunk afterward, I shut it, then drove right back to the hospital.
The first ICU patient I saw when I walked in was a Māori man whose age I couldn’t tell due to his injuries, his body showing signs of some kind of a catastrophic accident. The woman who sat beside him was reading quietly to him from what looked like a doorstop of a fantasy novel.
Her exhausted eyes met mine for a heartbeat, a painful understanding passing between us before I moved past.
Seeing a nurse with Diya when I reached her bed, I said, “Is everything okay?”
“Yes. I’m just checking her dressings.” After doing that, she pulled the curtains closed on either side of the bed but left the front open to the view of the nurses’ station. “Hazel’s on a break, but Maria’s monitoring Diya from the station.”
I was glad of the droplet of additional privacy. “Hi, baby.” I leaned over to lightly brush my lips over the side of Diya’s.
I hated the tube that came out of the other side of her mouth because it meant my beautiful wife couldn’t breathe on her own. The ventilator hissed, its mechanical breaths a constant pulse interspersed with beeps from other machines.
Her lips were soft, slicked over with something.
The nurses, taking care of her. But it wasn’t what she would’ve used.
Diya had a very specific five-step skin-care routine for the morning and an even longer one for nighttime.
“I’ll get you that raspberry-flavored stuff you like.
Korean beauty products, right? See? I do pay attention when you tell me these things. ”
Her hand remained motionless, her hair tangled on the pillow. I tried to smooth it out as gently as I could. “Who’s Annie, baby?” I murmured, thinking of how desperately she’d tried to tell me something when I’d first found her.
Annie…they said…about Annie…not…
But she was silent, and when a doctor walked in, I took the opportunity to ask him about Diya’s injuries in detail. It had struck me that I’d been wrong to tell the surgeon to stick to generalities—the exact nature of Diya’s wounds might tell me something about who’d done this to her.
“No smoke inhalation that we can determine,” Dr. Chen said, his voice far deeper than I’d expected given his near-skeletal frame.
“Your wife must’ve managed to get out before the fire really took hold.
Eleven stab wounds. Six of them were superficial—but five went deep enough to do significant damage.
One in particular only missed severing her abdominal aorta by a millimeter. ”
He pointed to Diya’s stomach. “That one caused the worst bleeding, but the ones that hit her kidney and inferior vena cava as well as her liver, along with the one at her neck, are the most dangerous. A little longer before getting her to the ER and it might’ve been too late.
” His manner was brusque and pragmatic, taking the emotion out of the situation.
It helped. “How long before you know if she’s out of the woods?”
“No way to tell at this stage,” the doctor said. “Right now, it’s watch and wait. Especially when it comes to her head injury.”
My phone buzzed. I’d have ignored it except that I’d just realized the time. “That might be Shumi’s family.” Taking it out, I glanced at the message. “They’re here, coming up to the ICU.”
Maybe they would know about Annie, this woman whose name Diya had never spoken until she lay bleeding and dying in my arms.