19. Odette
— ? —
Odette
Three Days Later
I wake to the sound of someone crying.
It takes me a moment to understand where I am. The ceiling is wrong, too white, too bright. The bed is wrong, too narrow, too hard. There’s something in my arm, a tube snaking up to a bag of clear fluid, and my head feels stuffed with cotton.
Then I remember.
Elliott. The gurney. The blood.
I try to sit up and immediately regret it. Pain lances through my skull and my stomach lurches and someone’s hand presses me gently back down.
“Easy.” Cat’s voice, soft and worried. “Easy, Odette. You’re safe. Everything is okay.”
I blink until her face comes into focus. She looks exhausted, dark circles under her eyes, her usually immaculate hair pulled back in a messy bun. She’s holding my hand, her fingers cold against mine.
“Elliott,” I manage. My voice comes out cracked and strange, like I haven’t used it in days. “Where’s Elliott?”
“He’s alive.” She squeezes my hand. “He’s out of surgery. He isn’t awake yet, but he’s alive. And the baby is fine. The doctors checked twice. She’s fine.”
The relief hits me like a physical blow. I feel it in my chest, in my throat, behind my eyes where the tears are already starting to fall.
“I need to see him.”
“You will. They’re moving you to his room as soon as the doctor clears you. Dayana is talking to them now.”
I look around the room for the first time. It’s small and clinical, a standard hospital room with beige walls and a window that looks out onto a courtyard. There are flowers everywhere, arrangements in vases on every surface, cards tucked into the bouquets.
“The girls have been here the whole time,” Cat says, following my gaze. “Taking shifts. Someone has always been with you. We didn’t want you to wake up alone.”
“How long?”
“Three days. They sedated you pretty heavily. The stress was affecting the baby, so they kept you under while they monitored her.”
Three days. I’ve been unconscious for three days while Elliott lay in another room, fighting for his life, alone.
“I need to see him,” I say again. “Please.”
Cat nods and slips into the hallway. I hear voices, hushed but urgent, and then more footsteps and the squeak of wheels.
Dayana appears in the doorway, her face tight with worry that she’s trying to hide.
“The doctor is on her way,” she says. “As soon as she clears you, we’re taking you to his room. It’s just down the hall.”
“Is he really okay?”
“He’s stable. The surgeons repaired the damage, and there’s no sign of infection. But he hasn’t woken up yet.” She pauses. “They say that isn’t unusual. That sometimes the body needs time to heal before it lets the mind come back.”
“But he’ll wake up.”
“They think so. They’re optimistic.”
Optimistic. The word feels hollow. Optimistic is what doctors say when they don’t want to make promises they can’t keep.
The doctor arrives a few minutes later, a brisk woman in blue scrubs who checks my vitals and shines a light in my eyes and asks me questions I can barely focus on. I answer automatically, my mind already down the hall, already at Elliott’s bedside.
“You’re stable,” she finally says. “But I want you to take it easy. No stress, no exertion, no emotional extremes. Your body has been through a lot, and the baby needs you calm.”
I nod without really hearing. Cat is already helping me into a wheelchair, draping a blanket over my lap, tucking my IV bag onto the pole attached to the chair.
The hallway is quiet. It’s early morning, I think, the light through the windows pale and gray. We pass empty rooms and closed doors and a nurse who nods at us without speaking.
Then Cat pushes open a door, and I see him.
Elliott is lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines that beep and hum and track every beat of his heart.
His face is pale, too pale, and there are dark bruises under his eyes.
His chest is wrapped in bandages, white gauze stained faintly pink where the wounds are still seeping.
A tube snakes from his arm to a bag of blood hanging beside the bed.
He looks small. Fragile. Nothing like the man who held me together when everything fell apart.
“Can I touch him?” I ask.
“Yes. They say he might be able to hear you. Talking to him could help.”
Cat positions my wheelchair beside his bed and then steps back, giving us privacy. I reach out and take his hand, careful not to disturb the IV lines, and hold on tight.
“Hey,” I say. My voice breaks on the word. “I’m here. I’m okay. The baby is okay. We’re both okay, and we need you to be okay too. So you need to wake up. You hear me? You need to wake up because I can’t do this without you.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t respond. His hand lies limp in mine, cool and still.
I talk anyway.
I talk for hours. I tell him about the baby, about the kicks I felt this morning, about the way she rolls over when I eat something sweet, like she already has opinions.
I tell him she’s going to want to meet her father, and that I don’t know how to explain a father who’s here and not here, whose hand I can hold but who can’t hold me back.
That’s when it hits me, all of it, in one cold wave.
That I could lose him. That the last thing I ever said to him before he walked out that door was a joke about a milkshake, and I didn’t tell him again that I loved him, didn’t say be careful, didn’t say anything that would matter if it turned out to be the end.
That I spent a whole marriage starving for someone to see me, and the moment someone finally did, someone with sandalwood on his skin and a wallet full of ultrasound pictures, the world tried to take him out of a parking lot two blocks away while I lay in a bed craving fries.
I press his cool knuckles to my mouth. My shoulders shake.
I’ve cried more this year than in the whole rest of my life combined, and I’m so tired of it, so tired of losing things, and I can’t lose this too.
I won’t survive it. I built a nursery around this man.
I let myself want, for the first time in years, and wanting is a door you can’t close again once it’s open.
“Don’t you dare,” I whisper into his hand.
“Don’t you dare make me raise her alone and spend the rest of my life knowing what it felt like to almost have this.
That’s crueler than anything Laurence ever did to me.
So you fight. You claw your way back. You come back to us, Elliott, because I’m not done.
We aren’t done. We were just getting started. ”
The monitor beeps. His chest rises and falls on its own, which the nurse says is a good sign, which isn’t enough, which will never be enough until his eyes open.
I tell him about the flowers in my room, about the cards from people I barely know, about the way Lucia threatened to burn down Laurence’s house if he ever walks free.
I tell him about the future I want, the one with him in it, the house we’ll buy and the nursery we’ll paint and the life we’ll build together.
I describe it in detail, room by room, as if saying it out loud might tether him to it, might give him something to come back for.
I talk until my voice gives out and Cat brings me water and I talk some more.
My back aches from the wheelchair. There’s a low, dragging tiredness in me that hasn’t lifted since I woke up, and once or twice a cramp tightens across my belly, brief and warning, and I breathe through it and say nothing, because if I mention it they’ll make me go back to my own room and I’m not leaving him.
The doctor’s words sit in the back of my mind the whole time.
No stress. No exertion. As if I could simply decide to be calm while the man I love lies here with tubes in his throat.
I press one hand to the swell of the baby and keep the other in his and split myself between the two of them, the way I suspect I’ll be splitting myself for the rest of my life.
Sometime in the afternoon, there’s a knock at the door.
A man in a rumpled suit steps into the room. Detective badge clipped to his belt. Notebook in his hand.
“Mrs. Fairbanks.” He nods at me. “I’m Detective Reyes. I’m the one working Elliott’s case.”
“Have you found who did this?”
“I’m going to be straight with you.” He’s gentle about it, which somehow makes it worse. “Not yet. Nobody saw anything. It was late, it was a dark parking lot, and his wallet and phone were both gone, so right now it looks like a mugging. Those are hard to solve. Sometimes we never do.”
“It was my husband.” The words come out flat and certain. “Laurence Fairbanks. He stood up in front of a whole ballroom two weeks ago and told everyone that Elliott was the only thing standing between him and his family. Two weeks later Elliott has a knife in his chest. That isn’t a mugging.”
“I think you may be right. Between us, the timing sits wrong with me too.” He rubs a hand down his face.
“But I can’t arrest a man for being cruel where people could hear him.
Your husband says he was somewhere else that night.
The woman from the Keys, the one everyone is whispering about, has sworn he was with her the whole time.
Until I can prove that’s a lie, there’s nothing I can do. ”
The room tilts. He’s going to walk. After everything, he’s going to walk free, and Elliott is going to lie here with tubes down his throat while the man who did this sleeps in his own bed.
I press my knuckles to my mouth so I don’t scream.
This is the part no one warns you about, that you can know in your bones who hurt the person you love and have it count for nothing.
That the truth isn’t enough. That it never was, not with him.
“Then she’s lying,” I say. My voice cracks. “Make her tell the truth.”
“I would, if I could find her. She won’t answer her door and her phone is off.” He pauses at the threshold. “If she matters to this as much as I think she does, somebody had better reach her before she disappears for good.”
He leaves. I sit there shaking, and then I wave Cat over and tell her every word of it. Her face goes still and sharp.
“Leave her to us,” Cat says quietly. “If she’s anywhere in this city, we’ll find her.”
I don’t ask how. The Orchid Society has ways I’ve never needed to know about. I go back to holding Elliott’s hand, talking to him, willing him to wake up, while somewhere out there five women start turning over the city looking for the one person who can end this.
The sun is setting when the door opens again.
I expect Cat. Or Dayana. Or one of the nurses who’ve been checking on us every hour.
Instead, Margaux walks in.
She looks terrible. Pale and exhausted, her hair limp, her clothes wrinkled like she’s been wearing them for days. There are dark circles under her eyes and a haunted look on her face that I’ve never seen before.
I don’t have the energy to fight with her. “What do you want?”
“I need to tell you something.” She closes the door behind her, her hands shaking. “About Laurence. About the night Elliott was attacked.”
“I already know. The detective said you told them he was with you.”
“I lied.” Her voice cracks. “He paid me to lie. He showed up at my apartment after it happened, shaking, blood under his nails. He washed up in my bathroom and changed, and I thought he took everything with him when he left. He begged me to swear he’d been with me all night.
Promised me money and a future and all the things he always promised.
And I was so angry, so hurt, so desperate for him to need me again, that I said yes. ”
I stare at her. “Then why are you here?”
“Because I found something.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a photograph. Her hand is shaking so badly she almost drops it. “His shirt. The one he was wearing that night. It was in a duffel bag in my guest closet. I didn’t know it was there until yesterday. I opened it and...”
She holds out the photograph. I take it.
The image shows a canvas duffel bag, unzipped, the contents visible. A white dress shirt, crumpled and stained. But the stains aren’t wine or coffee or any of the normal things that ruin clothes.
The stains are blood. Dark, rust-colored, covering the entire front of the fabric.
“I didn’t touch it,” Margaux says. “I called the police and told them exactly where to find it. Told them he was never at my apartment, that I lied, that I couldn’t live with myself if I let him get away with this.”
I set the photograph on the bed beside Elliott’s hand. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you doing this? You hate me. He’s paying you. Why break the alibi now?”
“Because of what he did yesterday.” Her mouth twists.
“One of the reporters cornered him outside the courthouse, asked about the woman from the Keys, the little boy. And on camera, in front of everyone, he laughed. He said he’d never met me.
Said the child wasn’t his, that I was an unstable woman making things up for attention and money.
” Her voice shreds. “It’s everywhere now.
My son doesn’t exist to him. He looked into a camera and erased us both to save himself, the way he erases everyone, and I sat in my apartment and watched it play over and over, and something in me just. Stopped. ”
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Your friends found me, you know.” She almost smiles.
“The quiet one with the notebook was outside my building this morning. She didn’t threaten me.
She just said she knew where I was, and that when I was ready to stop lying for him, she’d help me instead of him.
I think I’d have come anyway. But it was easier, knowing someone was already on my side. ”
“I thought I hated you.” She laughs, but it sounds like a sob.
“I thought you stole everything from me. My future, my happiness, the man I loved. But you were right. What you said at the flower shop. We aren’t enemies.
We’re just two women he used, two women he threw away the second we stopped being useful. ”
She straightens her spine.
“I have a son,” she says. “A little boy who deserves a mother who’s better than this. Better than lying for a man who’d deny him on television and put a knife in his own brother to keep a bloodline. I’m done protecting him. I’m done being the person he made me.”
I don’t know what to say. I’ve spent so long hating this woman, blaming her for her part in the destruction of my marriage, that I never stopped to think about what Laurence might have done to her too.
“Thank you,” I finally say. “For coming here. For telling the truth.”
“It doesn’t make up for what I did.”
“No. But it’s a start.”
She nods once, then turns and walks out without another word.
I sit there for a long time, staring at the photograph, processing what just happened.
Then, under my hand, Elliott’s fingers twitch.