Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
We would’ve been better people with Bea in our lives. I wouldn’t be this broken, hollow being who didn’t understand her place in the world. Bea had been my sun, had fed energy into me simply by existing. It was all I had ever wanted from her. Just that she exist.
When I’d thought her dead, I’d begun to wither on the vine.
“She was the only person I’ve ever fallen in love with,” I’d said gently to Darcie. “You murdered me when you took her from me.”
“She was unstable. She tried to kill hersel—”
“Stop, Darcie. You knew exactly what you were doing when you had her locked up. You knew that she’d never make it.”
And then I’d done . . . nothing.
Four of us in that Land Cruiser as the rain beat down and Darcie bled. I’d asked her about Professor Hammett with a kind of distant curiosity. “Kaea said you lied to us and it had to do with the professor.”
Faint with lack of blood and eager to please me, earn my forgiveness, she’d told me. So tawdry. A failing grade turned into a high pass after she caught him kissing his boyfriend. Two quiet men. Happy to be together. Except one of them was married. The lie Darcie’s joyous celebration of how she’d aced the class.
I’d wondered how Kaea had found out, hadn’t cared enough to dig any deeper. I’d just listened to the rain as Darcie’s pleas faded off into a whispering silence.
No one will ever know.
Only Grace.
And Grace would never tell. Because Grace knew how to be loyal. Yet Grace had also killed an innocent.
But . . . her life was done; she’d spend the rest of it behind locked doors, no threat to anyone else.
No one will ever know.
Grace wasn’t the most reliable keeper of secrets. But even if she told, even if anyone believed her, there was no way to prove that I’d taken my time getting to Jim’s. No way to prove that Darcie had begged until her voice failed.
No way to show that I’d watched her die.
I’d wondered if I’d be haunted by her slow death, but that wasn’t what haunted me. No, it was the thought of Bea curled up in an institutional bed crying because she thought we’d all abandoned her.
For Darcie . . . I felt no guilt at all.
Did that make me a psychopath, too?
56
Unconcerned by the idea that I might not be as sane as I believed myself to be, I pushed through the ward doors. It was far quieter here, and most people were in shared rooms with only curtains around their cubicles. No need for an excess number of nurses and orderlies when the vast majority of these patients didn’t require much beyond a regular check to ensure they remained stable.
Many would be discharged tomorrow.
Bea, however, had a room of her own. Must’ve been Ratene’s doing. So he could have a private space in which to talk to her. As it was, he hadn’t gotten his wish, with the doctors pronouncing her too drugged when she’d arrived—and then, he’d been busy with the scene at the estate. Later, it was Grace along with me who’d commanded his time.
“I haven’t, but that’s fine,” Ratene had said during one of our talks, when I’d asked him if he’d managed to speak with Bea yet. “Grace has admitted she kept Beatrice drugged the entire time Grace was at the estate, because Beatrice never agreed with her plans of revenge.
“I mostly need to talk to her about her unwilling detention at the facility, start the ball rolling on that investigation. But it’s not like I don’t have enough to do with business at the estate. The facility can wait.”
Bea was a victim.
As such, there was no cop outside her room.
I pushed inside the small space to find her bedside lamp on as she lay in bed with her eyes wide open. “Nae-nae. I was waiting for you.” She patted the sheet.
Toeing off my new sneakers, I managed to fit myself on the hospital bed, the two of us lying face-to-face, our breaths intermingling. She didn’t stop me when I touched my fingers to her cheek, reassuring myself that she was warm, that her blood flowed in her veins. “You’re alive.”
A smile that wasn’t quite right. “I’m not the same. I couldn’t always avoid the drugs there—and they didn’t give me the right ones until Grace got out and hacked the system, changing my assigned meds.”
The trick is to commit.
A year into her freedom and Grace had managed to create fraudulent paperwork good enough to convince Darcie that Bea really was dead. She’d gone to the extent of making a phone notification, the number spoofed to make it appear it came from the facility, and she’d sent invoices for a casket and a cremation.