Page 95 of The Girl from Widow Hills
“Are we okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, sorry, Elyse’s family came to the hospital this morning, I didn’t get the chance to tell you earlier. Pretty somber day. I’m just trying to shake it.”
“Oh, I wish I could’ve been there.” I wanted to tell them that Elyse was my friend; that she brightened my life in the short time I’d known her; that I missed her; that I was sorry.
“She had a history of abuse, but they thought she’d kicked it. Her family had gotten her help after her previous job, and they swore she was clean . . . but, I guess . . .” A shudder, all the things we had missed under the surface of one another.
“What had she been taking?”
“From the hospital? Opioids, benzodiazepines. What you might guess. They said she’d had a problem with opioids in the past, after a car accident in her late teens.” Like my mother, then. God, how had I not seen it? Elyse had even told me about her accident, her experience in the hospital that had led her to this career in the first place. She had given me enough to piece together the truth, and I’d missed it. “Best guess, she was selling the rest.” I’d thought I knew her better than that. But we all had our secrets.
Bennett stretched, working out a kink in his neck. He moaned. “I got someone to cover for me now, but I have to work the evening shift.”
“You okay to work?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m gonna have to be. We had to ask the ER to lend us some help from their department to cover Elyse’s position, and apparently, her replacement just quit, too. She was friends with Elyse.” He sighed. “It’s hitting the whole hospital hard.”
“Yeah.” I could feel it coming on here, too: the grief, mixed with the guilt.
He looked around the house. “Will you be okay here?”
Nathan was being held in Kentucky, and Rick was home, presumably watching. “Yes,” I said.
“I’m so glad it’s over,” he said, voice lower. “That you’re okay.”
My stomach sank. “It’s not over. It’s going to be chaos.” In a way, it was just getting started. Nathan might be gone, but people were still watching. The girl from Widow Hills was a victim, a witness—if there wasn’t a deal, I might have to testify. I’d have to ask the detective about that, but one thing was certain: It was not over yet.
He frowned. “I meant the part where someone was . . . watching you. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I left you alone here.”
I looked at him. “None of us knew,” I said. None of us guessed at the reach of that story—across time and distance. Across a generation. Stories like this, they didn’t end. They only grew.
He smiled when he left. A promise to see me this weekend, to catch up, like everything was normal now. I let him believe it. His hope was contagious.
RICK DIDN’T COME OVERafter Bennett left, though I knew he’d been looking for me.
I crossed the boundary between our yards, sidestepping that black hole of gravity where Sean Coleman had waited and died. I could hear movement inside Rick’s house, something dragging against the wood floor, and I knocked. “Rick? It’s me. It’s Liv.”
“One minute,” he said, before opening the front door.
He looked the same as always, but behind him, there was a duffel bag on the wood floor. His hands hovered just over my shoulders before dropping. “Been waiting on you to get back. Your friend, there, he told me what happened. Nina, too. But I wanted to hear it from you, that you’re okay.”
I leaned against the doorjamb, able to be honest here. “It was horrible,” I said, the word scratching at my throat.
He nodded, gesturing for me to come inside. “He’s locked up now, though?”
I walked across the living room and sank into his couch, staring at the bag on the floor, trying to process. “Yes. He’s being held in Kentucky.” I gestured to his luggage. “What’s going on, Rick?”
“Well,” he said, and now he was looking off to the side, out the window, his throat moving. “I thought I might try to talk to my son.” He shuffled his feet. “He’s in Atlanta, it’s not too far.”
“Now?” I asked. “Today?”
“Well,” he said. “As long as you’re okay. I was waiting on you.”
It seemed that the events of the last few days had shaken something loose in everyone. Like we could all see the potential for harm—how the past inevitably snowballs into the present. But that this moment, in turn, would soon enough become the past, the start of a new chain of events. “No, that’s good. That’s a good idea.”
And then he stepped forward, dropped his voice. “The weapon, is it gone?”
I nodded once, stoically.
