Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
Brittney
“Hello.”
I jump at the voice behind me, dropping the porcelain cup. It shatters in the kitchen sink.
Shit!
I spin around. Sabine is standing in the doorway, frowning.
Shitshitshit.
“I’m so sorry, uh,” I turn back to the sink and begin picking up the broken china shards .
Sabine joins me at the sink, studies me for a moment, then looks out the window, then back at me.
“Oh!” she exclaims, “You cut yourself. Stop. Brittney, let go of the cup?—”
I look down at my hands. They’re trembling. Sure enough, a line of blood is dripping down my thumb, mixing with the water as it spirals down the sink. I didn’t even feel it.
“Here, let me . . .” Sabine lifts my hand and turns off the water. She grabs a paper towel and wraps it around my hand while applying pressure to stop the bleeding.
I’m the nurse. I should be the one tending to my stupid little cut.
My cheeks heat. I’m humiliated.
It doesn’t help that Sabine is studying me so intensely that it feels like a laser beam on the side of my face. I can’t look at her. She’s so beautiful and perfect, and I’m—I’m what? A freaking mess. A basic, boring mess who breaks a cup and cuts my finger and doesn’t even notice it.
“You okay?” She asks.
“Yeah. Oh no,” my pulse skyrockets, “I broke one of his cups . . .” I pull out of her hold and toss the bloody paper towels in the wastebasket. When I begin to pick up the broken china, she stops me. “Don’t worry about it. He has a million priceless cups, trust me. I’ll tell him I did it.” She winks.
“Really?” I’m fighting tears. “You’d—you’d do that for me?”
“Of course. The next one’s on you, though,” she winks again, then falls serious. “So. Um. How are you doing with what happened earlier? Do you have any questions?”
“Uh yeah. What was that about? You screamed, he screamed, and Valerie . . . she was just standing there, in the hallway, white as a ghost. The case file said she hardly gets out of bed. I was told to never let her walk alone because she’s still adjusting to her new medications—I got the impression she couldn’t walk without assistance.”
“That’s correct. That was very . . . very strange. It wasn’t normal, so I don’t think you need to worry about it happening often.”
“I feel bad. I should have been there.”
“You have to eat dinner, right? It’s unreasonable to expect you to be in the room with her every second of every hour.”
I glance into the hallway. “Is he mad?”
“Astor?”
“Mr. Stone, yes.”
Sabine winces for a moment and I’m not sure why. “No, Mr. Stone isn’t mad at you. Again, I think it’s understood that you can’t be with her every second. But, I do want to ask . . . did anything strange happen today before dinner? Was she acting funny? Anything like that?”
“No. Well . . . I don’t know what her acting strange would look like because I’ve only spent a short amount of time with her, but nothing happened that alarmed me.”
“Did she get up at all?”
“To the restroom, but that was it.”
“What about her medication? Did you administer any this afternoon?”
“Yes, of course. She takes medication three times a day.”
“And you gave the correct dosage . . .”
My stomach sinks. Could I have mixed up her medication?
“I’m—yes. Of course I gave her the correct amount,” I say, far too quickly.
Sabine’s eyes narrow and just when I think she is going to press the issue further, she says, “Brittney. You’re still bleeding.”
“Oh.” I look down at my thumb. The blood is now dripping onto the floor. “Sorry.”
I can practically feel Sabine’s scrutiny as I clumsily wipe up the blood from the floor.
She’s frowning when I stand. “Let’s get you bandaged up, and again, what happened today isn’t the norm, so don’t worry about it,” she says referring to Valerie.
Little does she know, that’s not what I’m upset about.