Chapter 37 Cody
The physical therapist's name is Dana.
She's efficient and unsentimental and doesn't ask me how I'm feeling beyond what the shoulder and the ribs require, which is exactly what I want from her.
She comes to the house every morning at nine, works with me for an hour, writes notes on her clipboard, and leaves.
No small talk. No careful expressions. No one managing me.
I appreciate that more than she knows.
It's been three days since the hospital.
Three days of my father's house — the high ceilings, the imported silence, the quality of a home that has always functioned more as a backdrop for a certain kind of life than as a place where anyone actually lives.
My room is exactly as I left it. My father has been careful about that.
Nothing moved, nothing touched, the whole space held in suspension like a museum exhibit waiting for its subject to return.
I returned.
But I'm not the same subject.
Dana packs up her bag at ten past ten and tells me I'm progressing ahead of schedule. I thank her warmly. She leaves. The house goes quiet.
I sit on the edge of my bed and rotate my shoulder slowly — forward, back, testing the range, feeling where the resistance lives and where it's loosened since last week.
Better. The ribs still pull when I breathe deep, but that's healing too, the kind of healing you can feel happening if you pay attention to your own body the way I've learned to pay attention to everything.
I pay attention to everything.
I stand and walk to the window.
The grounds below are immaculate — my father's doing, the same gardening service that has maintained this property since before I was born. Hedges trimmed to geometry. The gravel drive raked clean. Everything is ordered and controlled and exactly as it should appear from the outside.
My father is good at appearances.
I learned from the best.
I think about Adela's voice on the phone this morning. Warm, slightly sleepy, the sound of a girl who picked up on the second ring and performed ease so naturally I almost missed the performance entirely.
Almost.
I've been almost missing it since she walked into my hospital room.
I reach for my phone.
Serena answers on the first ring.
"Twice in one week," she says. "I should buy a lottery ticket."
"Tell me about the library."
A pause. Brief, barely there, the half-second of someone recalibrating. "What about it?"
"You mentioned it before that she'd been spotted on the third floor. Political science section." I keep my voice easy. Just catching up. Just curious. "You said she wasn't usually alone."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Serena."
"I don't know anything for certain," she says carefully.
"You're not going to start anything. I just want to understand what she's been dealing with while I was out.
She's been alone on this campus, and I wasn't there for her.
" I let the right amount of weight settle into that.
Not an accusation. Concern. A boyfriend catching up on the weeks he missed. "I feel terrible about it."
The pause this time is different. It’s softer. I hear her deciding to believe me, a decision I've watched Serena make a hundred times because she always wants to believe the version of things that requires the least of her.
"There's a guy," she says. "I've seen them together a few times. Always in the library. Third floor." A beat. "He's not from our circle."
"What does he look like?"
"Dark. Tall. Serious looking." She pauses. "He's not on the team."
Something cold moves through me and settles quietly at the base of my spine.
Not on the team.
So not Theo.
"Has anyone else seen them together?" I ask.
"I mean, people talk." She says it carefully, like she's handing me something fragile. "You know how it is. New girl on campus, she's your girlfriend, people notice who she's spending time with."
"What are people saying?"
"Nothing specific. Just." Another pause. "That she's not exactly keeping a low profile for someone whose boyfriend is in the hospital."
I look out the window at the manicured grounds below.
"Thank you," I say. My voice is warm. Grateful. Exactly what she needs to hear. "I appreciate you looking out for me."
"Of course." She exhales, relieved, the tension of the conversation releasing now that she's been thanked. "Are you feeling better? You sound better."
"Every day," I say.
We talk for three more minutes about nothing. I ask about her classes. I laugh at something she says. I am completely present and completely elsewhere simultaneously.
I hang up and set the phone on the windowsill.
Not Theo.
Someone else.
I think about this carefully. Beckett near Elm Hall — that's one thread.
Serena saw him more than once, which means more than once.
And now a second thread — a man in the library who isn't on the team, who has been there with her repeatedly, who Serena can describe as dark and tall and serious but can't name.
Two threads.
Two men.
And Adela is moving between them on a campus she transferred to for me.
I pick up the phone again.
This time I don't call anyone.
I open the notes app, and I make a list the way my father taught me to make lists — not of feelings, not of grievances, not of the things I want to do to the people who put me in a hospital bed and apparently used my absence to help themselves to what belongs to me.
Just facts.
Clean, cold, numbered facts.
Beckett. Elm Hall. More than once.
Unknown male. Library. Third floor. Repeated contact.
Adela performing devoted girlfriend with no visible seams.
Adela performing devoted girlfriend with no visible seams while doing items 1 and 2.
I read the list back.
Then I add:
She doesn't know I know any of this.
I look at number five for a long time.
That's the thing about information. It's only leverage if the other person doesn't know you have it. My father taught me that when I was twelve years old, and I have never once forgotten it. You don't spend what you have until you know exactly what it's worth and exactly what you want in return.
I know what I want.
I want everything back exactly where it was.
No — that's not quite right.
I want everything back exactly where it was, and I want every person who touched what was mine while I was gone to understand precisely what that cost them.
I close the notes app.
I walk to my closet and pull out clothes that aren't hospital-issue for the first time in weeks — dark jeans, a clean shirt, a jacket that fits the way it's supposed to fit.
I dress slowly, checking each movement against what my body will allow.
The shoulder holds. The ribs pull slightly when I reach for the jacket, but not enough to matter.
I check my reflection.
I look like myself.
Not the diminished, careful version that Adela held hands with in a hospital bed. Not the pale, quiet, grateful-to-be-alive performance I've been giving for an audience of nurses and my father and a girlfriend who I'm now certain has been performing right back at me.
Just myself.
I pick up my phone one more time and pull up Adela's contact.
I type, Dinner this weekend. My dad's place. Just us.
I watch the three dots appear almost immediately.
She was waiting for this.
That tells me something, too.
Her response comes through.
Adela: I'd love that. Just tell me when.
I look at those six words and feel something that other people would probably call satisfaction, but I call something closer to the quiet before a very specific kind of storm.
I type back, Saturday. Seven o'clock.
Then I add — because I know her. I know exactly what it does to her, because I have been studying her for two years, the way you study something you intend to keep:
I've missed you. More than you know.
I watch the three dots.
Adela: I've missed you more.
I set the phone down and walk back to the window.
The grounds below are still immaculate. The gravel still raked clean. Everything is ordered and controlled and exactly as it should appear from the outside.
Saturday.
Three days.
Enough time for her to feel safe about it.
Enough time for whatever she's been doing to continue, to compound, to give me more of what I already have.
Enough time for the man in the library and Beckett near Elm Hall to do whatever they're going to do next while Adela believes she's managing all of it cleanly.
She thinks she's the one who knows things.
I almost find that endearing.
I press two fingers against the bridge of my nose and breathe. In. Out. The way my father taught me when I was twelve, furious, and wanted to put my fist through something.
Emotion is a resource.
Spend it where it earns something.
I have not spent a single unit of it yet.
Saturday, I will spend all of it.
I turn from the window, walk downstairs, and eat breakfast in my father's kitchen.
I have always been good at waiting.