Page 26 of The Girl from Widow Hills
“What happened to you?” Sydney asked, voice different—not as a doctor but as an acquaintance.
“I hurt my knee outside. I tripped.”
“Well,” Detective Rigby added, letting the word hang in the air. “She tripped over a body she discovered outside. Which probably explains the blood pressure.”
Sydney’s head jerked to the side, taking in what the detective was saying. She slowly turned back to me. “A body, huh? That must’ve given you quite the scare.” But her tone was flat, and I wondered if the detective could hear it, too. We’d all seen bodies here, in various states. Maybe, in her opinion, it was a disconnect I should have perfected by now. How desensitized she must be to trauma and death. Even to me, they were rows on a spreadsheet. Tallies in the day.
But not in the yard. Not around our homes. Not in the middle of the night, when we woke up with no idea how we’d gotten there. I was betting Sydney’s blood pressure would be through the roof, too, if a body were the first thing she saw upon waking.
Sydney took a steady breath, then placed her gloved hands around my kneecap.
Detective Rigby leaned forward and cleared her throat. “The knee, it’s from an impact injury?” she asked.
The doctor’s hands stilled as the two shared a prolonged look, and I suddenly understood. It was the reason she’d brought me here, and why she wasstillhere—to figure out what had happened out there. Whether I had tripped. Whether I had omitted some other details in the lead-up. She might not be questioning me in an official capacity now, but she was gathering information. She was checking out my story—seeing if it held.
The question she never asked that was lingering under the surface: Was there something else I’d neglected to share? Some measure of violence that led to another?
Sydney turned around and pulled the curtain abruptly shut, blocking the view of the nurse who had been standing nearby. Not that it would stop her from hearing.
“You tell me, Liv,” Sydney said, gloved fingers gently pressing into my knee again. “Is that how it happened?”
Three women in the room, understanding what else could’ve been possible out there. The dirt on my clothes. The blood. The fear.
I winced, leaning back on my elbows. “I didn’t know it was a body at first. I heard the phone, and I tripped over it.” A shudder. “Over him.”
Sydney looked into my eyes for a moment before turning to the detective. “Yeah, this sure looks like a hard, uneven impact. A root or a rock, I’m guessing?”
I shook my head. “I think so. It was dark. It all happened so fast.”
I watched as the doctor quickly scanned the rest of my body—the clean shirt, the exposed skin. I’d assessed myself in Rick’s bathroom, and Detective Rigby had done the same when we were in my bedroom. There was nothing to see. No reason to suspect a different version of events.
Detective Rigby went back to her chair, sending messages on her phone, and Sydney got set up to treat the wound.
After numbing the area, she cleaned and stitched me up, her hands fast and practiced. A pattern that was hypnotizing to watch. When she finished, she tore her gloves off quickly, the sound like a snap cutting through the room. “All right. We’ll need to see you back in about ten days to have the stitches taken out. It looks worse than it is, with the localized swelling. Let’s get you an anti-inflammatory. Maybe with something to take the edge off the nerves, yeah?”
“Yes, okay,” I said.
“Any drug allergies or adverse reactions we need to be aware of?”
“None,” I said. One time, when I was a teenager, I was given a medication to calm me before what the doctors claimed was a routine procedure to fix an outstanding issue in my arm, and I had no recollection of anything until hours after the surgery, when the nurse beside my bed finally said,Welcome back, Arden. I wasn’t sure if that counted as an adverse reaction, but at the moment, I welcomed the idea. Of taking a pill and disconnecting.
“Is there someone at home with you?” Sydney asked, eyes on the chart she was filling out.
I couldn’t tell why she was asking, just like with Dr. Cal. Whether she had access to other information that she wasn’t disclosing.
When I didn’t answer, she paused and looked up. “This medicine I’m prescribing is also a pretty decent sedative. Just making sure someone will be around to check in on you.”
I was about to answer that my neighbor would certainly check in when the curtain peeled back, and a wide-eyed Elyse stood on the other side. “Well, shit,” she said. “Hey. You okay?”
Her face was completely clean of makeup, her hair tied up on top of her head. Loose T-shirt, leggings, sneakers. I tried to see the signs of Trevor on her.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
But I knew. The look from the woman behind the desk when I checked in. Or the nurse who had taken my blood pressure. Or the one with her back turned when the curtain was pulled shut. The way information swirled through back channels in a place like this.
“You didn’t call,” Elyse said. Then she looked at the detective, confused. Stuck out her hand. “I’m Elyse, a nurse here.” Waiting for an explanation.
“Nina Rigby. I’m the detective who got the call tonight.” She reached out to shake Elyse’s hand.
