Chapter 3

Chapter 3

ELENA

The taxi smelled like pine air freshener and old leather, and I sat in the back with my hand cradled against my chest, not looking at it.

I had looked at it once, back at the office, and that had been enough for me.

The blister had spread across the back of my hand, the skin red and bleeding causing pangs of pain every moment as I bit back on my lips to suppress it.

I had taken myself to the hospital plenty of times before. Foster care teaches you that early that aside yourself, no one else cares about you. You learn to assess your own injuries, decide whether they are bad enough to say something about, usually decide they are not, and carry on. This was not so different.

Except that it was, because Adrian had carried Vivian to an ambulance for a burn smaller than my palm, and I was sitting in the back of a taxi alone, gritting my teeth so hard my jaw ached.

Stop. That is not useful right now. I focused on breathing until we pulled up to the emergency entrance.

---

The nurse who called me in was maybe twenty five or thirty, and looked very efficient, the kind of person who had seen enough to not be easily rattled by whatever the day brought in for her. She took one look at my hand and drew a sharp breath, before she looked at me with concern in her eyes.

"How long have you had this?"

"A few hours," I said.

She gave me a look that said she did not appreciate that answer. "You should have come immediately. This needed attention the moment it happened." She was already guiding me to a seat, pulling on gloves. "How did you let it get this bad?"

I had no good answer for that so I said nothing.

She worked carefully, cleaning around the blister, and I stared at the wall above her head and tried to think about anything else to take my mind away from the pain. The tiles. The color of the ceiling. Whether I had locked my desk drawer before coming to the hospital.

"We had another burn patient earlier," she said, her voice shifting into that particular conversational tone nurses used when they were trying to keep you calm and distracted. She must have noticed my silence was a bit loud and was trying to lessen the tension.

"Came in carried by her husband. You should have seen him, so frantic, insisting on the attending physician immediately to come and check up on her, threatening to sue the hospital, like we were the ones who hurt her." She shook her head with a small smile.

"The burn ended up being a small reddened patch. Would have been fine with a cold compress and some time. Just caused up a ruckus for nothing, it was embarrassing."

Something hollow opened in my chest. I soon realized that the two people the nurse is referring to must be Adrian and Vivian.

"But the way he fussed," she continued. "You could tell he truly cares for her. If his wife had been burned as badly as you are right now—" She glanced up at me and shook her head again, almost admiringly. "I can only imagine."

I said nothing.

My phone lit up on the seat beside me. Adrian's name on the screen.

I stared at it.

The nurse reached for the instrument she would use to lance the blister and I braced myself, and at that exact moment the sharp pressure hit and the pain spiked white and sudden, startling me as I cried out, my eyes brimming with tears and without thinking I reached for the phone and the call ended under my thumb.

"Sorry," I managed. "Sorry, I—"

"Why didn't you answer?"

The voice came from the entrance startling us both as I looked up, confusion and disbelief apparent on my face.

Adrian stood at the emergency room doorway, phone still in his hand, eyes scanning the room until they landed on me. He looked the way he always looked when something had disrupted his plans, that gritting of his teeth, he always did when he was trying to remain composed.

The nurse turned to look at him.

"What is your relationship to this patient?" she asked standing a bit in front of me to protect me from any sudden attacks.

He crossed the room toward me, and I watched his face as he processed what he was seeing, my hand in the nurse's gloved grip, the raw extent of the damage laid out clearly under the examination light.

He opened his mouth.

"Adrian."

Vivian's voice drifted in from the corridor behind him. Her tone was light, unhurried, like she was seeing him out, but was not in pains or in a hurry.

He paused.

Something inside me went very still. That familiar feeling, the one where I became a spectator in my own life, settled over me like a second skin.

The nurse looked between the three of us, waiting for an answer.

"No particular relation," I said.

The words came out steady, like I had practiced, Adrian's gaze cut to mine. A flash of something crossed his face, irritation or something more complicated, I could not tell.]

"She is my wife," he said.

The nurse scanned all three of us in the way that people did when they had seen this specific kind of situation before and had made their own conclusions. She gave Adrian a look that managed to be entirely professional and entirely disapproving at the same time, realizing the knight in shining armour she had been praising was a total scumbag then turned back to me.

"This is going to hurt," she said. "I need you to hold still."

I held still.

I did not make a sound, though the pain was significant enough that my vision blurred at the edges and I had to focus very hard on a point on the wall. When it was over I sat very still and breathed carefully while the nurse applied the dressing.

Adrian had not moved from his point, his posture still and unmoving. I could feel him watching, his eyes boring at me, but I refused to acknowledge his presence.

She finished, gave me aftercare instructions in a brisk, efficient voice, and I stood and reached for my bag, eager to get out of here and away from his presence.

The movement pulled wrong, my muscle knotting, encountering a sharp movement they had not anticipated. My injured hand closed around the strap and the pain was sudden and disorienting and the room tilted slightly and I was not going to fall, I was catching myself, but Adrian was already there, his hand at my elbow, steadying me before I had fully registered he had moved.

"Why didn't you tell me how bad it was?" His voice was quiet. Close.

I straightened. His hand stayed on my arm.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Elena—"

"Adrian." Vivian's voice again, from the corridor, carrying a note I recognized. Not quite distress. Something performed around the edges of distress. "I cannot feel anything in my hand. I think something might be wrong."

His head turned toward the sound, his jaw clenching for a moment as I could see him actively deciding to stay or to go. I looked at his profile. The way his attention moved without his meaning it to, pulled like a compass toward her, always wanting to make sure she is okay.

“Adrian please, stay with me, it hurts so badly, Vivian can have the doctor look at her, it is not that bad. The nurse said so.” I pleaded as Adrian shook his head.

“No, you do not understand, she needs me and right now her hands are more important than your clinginess to me.” He said shaking his head as I felt my heart shattering with every word that came out of his mouth.

“Adrian, please.” I pleaded as he let go of my hand . "Please don't go."

He hesitated. Then he went.