Chapter Fourteen—Dalen
I STOP THREE FEET INSIDE the door of her hospital room.
She’s propped against white pillows with a bandage taped over her left temple and bruising already darkening one side of her jaw.
There are scrapes along her forearms, another bruise rising above the neckline of the hospital gown, and enough swelling around her right knee that I can see it beneath the blanket.
Her hair has been combed away from the bandage, but dried blood remains near her ear.
The first thing she says is, “Don’t touch me.”
I want to cross the room so badly my hands hurt with the effort of keeping them at my sides. “Okay.”
“Everything hurts.” Julie looks at me for another second, then turns toward the window.
It’s dark outside now. I have no idea how long I’ve been in this hospital.
Two hours, maybe three. Time became useless when Officer Bennett called from an ambulance and told me Julie was conscious after briefly losing consciousness but injured.
I got here before she did.
I didn’t go into the treatment area when they brought her through because she hadn’t asked for me.
I sat in the waiting room while Calla handled the calls I couldn’t form into coherent sentences and a detective asked questions I answered badly.
Mara arrived twenty minutes later and cried when she saw me.
I apologized to her for frightening her on the phone.
She told me to shut up and asked whether Julie was alive.
She is. I keep looking at the evidence of how close that came to changing.
Julie reaches for the plastic cup on the tray beside her bed. Her hand shakes enough to make the ice rattle, and I take one involuntary step before catching myself.
Her gaze snaps to me.
I stop again. “Sorry.”
She drinks and returns the cup to the tray without help. “How’s Meg?”
“I don’t know much. She’s still being treated.”
Julie’s mouth tightens. “She took a lot of pills.”
“They know.”
“She hit her head too.”
“They know that. So did you.” I don’t much care about Meg’s current state since she tried to kill my wife.
“I bit her.”
That isn’t what I expected. “Oh...”
Julie turns back toward me, and something close to disbelief crosses her face. “That’s all you have?”
I have several things. None of them seem useful. “Do you want me to say more?”
Her mouth twitches despite everything. “You really are trying.”
“Yes.”
She tilts her head slightly. “It’s weird.”
“I know.”
The tiny change in her expression disappears. She rubs two fingers carefully over the back of her hand where an IV is taped in place. “I bit her because she tried to put a pill in my mouth. The first of many.”
My stomach twists. The detective told me there had been a struggle and officers found prescription medication scattered upstairs. He didn’t tell me that.
Julie keeps looking at me. “She was going to make it look like I overdosed.”
I grip the back of the visitor chair and don’t sit. “Did she tell you that?”
“Yes. She said if they found me after I left you, with everything I’d been saying about someone being in the house, nobody would think she did it.
” Julie swallows and looks toward the window again.
“She said she only needed me to sleep for a few hours. I’m not sure I believe that’s all she intended. ”
Neither am I. Saying that would make this about me though. “What did the doctor say about your head?”
“Mild concussion. They’re keeping me overnight because I lost consciousness and rolling down a staircase with another adult is medically frowned upon.” She shifts her leg and winces. “My knee is sprained. My ribs are bruised. My shoulder is angry with me. Nothing’s broken.”
The list should reassure me. Instead, every item gives me another place Meg put her hands on my wife while I was across town. I don’t voice that, not wanting to exacerbate whatever horrible things she’s thinking.
There’s a chair behind me. I could ask if she wants me to sit, but even that seems like making her manage me. I stay where I am until Julie notices and sighs.
“You can sit down, Dalen. I’m angry with you. I’m not making you stand in the corner.”
I pull the chair farther from the bed before sitting. The distance is ridiculous in a hospital room this small, yet Julie watches me move it and some of the tension leaves her shoulders.
That hurts too.
She closes her eyes for several seconds. “How did you know?”
“About Meg?”
Her eyes open. “What else would I ask?”
I deserve that. “I tried to send her lunch.”
Julie frowns.
“The deli called her office to confirm the delivery. They said she didn’t work there anymore.”
For the first time since I walked in, surprise breaks through her expression. “Lunch?”
“Yes.”
“You figured out my sister was destroying my life because you tried to send her a turkey sandwich?”
“Turkey on sourdough.”
A sound escapes her that starts as a laugh and ends somewhere painful. She presses a hand against her ribs. “Ow. Don’t be funny.”
I hold up my hands. “I wasn’t trying to be.”
“That makes it worse.”
I wait until she settles before continuing. “I called Meg. She told me she was at work, so I called the company. Landry told me she’d been fired a little over four months ago for taking money.”
Julie nods. “She told me.”
“She admitted it?”
“Eventually. She admitted the accounts too.”
That takes me a second. “What accounts?”
Julie looks down at the blanket. “I found an account in my name yesterday. Northstar Credit Services. Twenty-three thousand four hundred twelve dollars. Then I checked my credit and found a Wells Fargo card for another nine thousand.”
I stare at her.
“Meg opened them.”
I curse.
“I asked her about them, and she clearly knew what I meant.” Julie picks at a loose thread on the blanket. “Then she admitted she borrowed the money.”
The word makes my teeth clench. “Borrowed.”
“Her word, also applied to my identity.” She scowls.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Julie looks up.
I know the answer before she gives it, and I wish I could pull the question back.
“Because I didn’t want you involved.”
I nod. “Right.”
“I knew exactly what would happen if I told you. You’d have attorneys on it before I finished the sentence. Somebody at Dorsey Capital would call Northstar. You would probably buy Northstar and purge the record. You’d freeze everything, pull records, find out who did it, and hand me a solution.”
I can’t argue with any of that. It’s how I would protect my wife, but she considers it managing, not helping.
Julie shifts against the pillows. “I needed to know I could handle one thing in my own life without you deciding what happened next.”
I keep my voice neutral. “You did handle it.”
Her gaze sharpens. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not.”
“It sounded like it.”
“Then I said it wrong.” I lean forward before catching myself and settling back against the chair. “I was trying to say I understand why you didn’t tell me.”
She studies me long enough that I have to resist filling the silence.
“I don’t think you do yet,” she says.
“Probably not.”
That answer seems to surprise her.
A nurse comes in to check Julie’s IV and ask about her pain. I move out of the way while Julie rates it a six and refuses anything stronger until she knows whether the detective is coming back tonight. The nurse tells her the detective can wait until morning and offers medication again.
Julie glances at me before answering.
The movement is tiny but guts me.
Two weeks ago, she would have taken whatever the nurse recommended without wondering what I thought. Tonight, she checks my face because I spent days questioning whether she was sleeping enough, eating enough, or thinking clearly enough.
I look down at my hands.
Julie tells the nurse she’ll take the medication. When we’re alone again, she says, “You saw that.”
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t asking permission.”
I nod.
“I was checking whether you were going to look worried.”
“I understood.”
She folds her arms carefully over her stomach. “Were you?”
“Yes.”
Her expression hardens.
“Because you’ve had a head injury,” I add. “I would’ve been worried about you taking anything they gave you even before this. The difference is that I would’ve kept it to myself unless you asked.”
Julie watches me for a long moment. Skepticism is etched into every line of her face. “Would you? Really?”
“Before all this?”
“Yes.”
I think about it instead of giving her the answer I want to be true. “Probably not.”
Her laugh has no humor in it. “At least that’s honest.”
“I would’ve asked what they gave you. Then I would’ve asked the dosage and side effects. If I didn’t like an answer, I would’ve asked for the doctor.”
She takes that mildly. “You would’ve Googled it.”
“I would’ve had Calla Google it.”
That almost gets another smile, but Julie looks away before it forms. “That’s the problem.”
“I know.”
“No, Dalen.” She turns back to me. “I need you to hear this without agreeing because you think agreement is what I need tonight.”
I straighten in the chair. “All right.”
Julie rubs her thumb over the edge of the hospital bracelet. “Meg stood beside my bed, and I told you somebody was there. You believed me. The door was open the next morning, and you believed me. The necklace disappeared, and you believed me. Then she started giving you explanations.”
I don’t interrupt.
“She didn’t need to convince me I was losing my mind.
She tried, but I knew what I remembered.
She needed you to believe it was possible.
” Julie’s voice falters, and she presses her lips together before continuing.
“Every time you listened to her instead of me, it became easier for her. She gave you the fake call. She told you about Mom. She made normal things sound like symptoms, and you carried all of it home.”
Every word is like a knife to the heart, and they’re all true. “I did.”
Julie shakes her head. “You’re doing it.”
I close my mouth.
“I know you did. I was there.” She pulls the blanket higher over her legs. “I don’t need you to confirm every sentence. I need you to understand what it was like.”
I nod and wait.