CHAPTER 5

Three knocks.

Slow. Careful. The kind a man gives when he already knows he isn’t welcome.

I freeze in the middle of the kitchen with the bowl still in my hands. Water runs over my fingers and I forget to turn off the tap.

“Serena.”

His voice comes through the wood, low and rough, like he has been shouting for hours and lost it halfway.

I set the bowl in the sink without a sound. Then I do something I’m not proud of. I tiptoe to the door like a child hiding from a monster and press my back against the wall beside the frame, where the peephole can’t see me.

Elias told me not to open it for anyone.

I wasn’t planning to.

“I know you’re in there,” Damien says. “The light is on under the door. And Elias’s car isn’t downstairs.”

Of course he checked. Of course he did.

“I got the address from someone at the hospital. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry for that too.” A pause. “I’m not going to force my way in. I wouldn’t. I just need you to know that.”

I say nothing. My hand slides to my stomach on its own.

“You don’t have to answer. Honestly, I’d rather you didn’t, because I don’t know what I’d say if you did.”

A dry laugh, with nothing funny in it.

“You fainted in court. I saw Elias carry you out and I couldn’t even follow, because Bianca was holding my arm and I let her. I let her hold me back while you were on the floor.”

My throat tightens.

“I called you twenty-two times,” he says. “I know it’s too many. I kept telling myself the next one would be the last, and then my thumb would do it again.”

I almost laugh. I almost cry. I do neither.

“Are you hurt? That’s all. I just need to know you’re okay.”

The silence stretches. I keep my lips pressed together so hard they hurt. If I open my mouth, I’m afraid I’ll scream at him. Or worse, I’m afraid I’ll say yes, I’m okay, and let him hear how badly I’m lying.

“Right,” he says quietly. “That’s fine.”

He doesn’t leave.

“I didn’t come to defend myself. There’s nothing I can say that makes what you saw any better. I know that.”

I close my eyes.

And just like that, I’m nineteen again, sitting on the hospital roof with a vending machine coffee that’s far too sweet, and a boy in a white coat is asking me who I am when my last name isn’t on the building. I hated how my heart answered him back then.

I hate it more now.

“There’s one thing I have to ask,” Damien says. “And you can ignore it.”

I hold my breath.

“Don’t go back to your parents’ house. Not to apologize, not to pick up your things, not for anything. Please.”

What?

Out of everything he could ask, that’s the one I never expected. Not forgive me. Not hear me out. Just stay away from my own family.

Why would he care?

My parents have never been kind, but they have always been my parents. Cold, demanding, impossible to please. But there is a difference between a family that doesn’t love you enough and a family a man warns you to stay away from.

Is this another trick? Another piece of whatever game he and Bianca have been playing behind my back?

“I’m going to slide something under the door,” he says. “Read it when I’m gone. Or don’t. It’s your choice.”

Paper rustles. A folded white square slips under the door and stops against my sock.

I don’t pick it up.

“Goodnight, Serena.”

I wait for the footsteps. The elevator. The slow fade of a man walking away.

Instead, there’s a soft thud against the door, and the wood vibrates against my shoulder. He has sat down. Right outside. His back against my door, close enough that if I turned around and put my palm flat on it, I could almost feel him breathing.

“I’m not going to knock again,” he says, tiredly. “I’ll just stay a minute.”

A minute turns into ten. Ten into twenty.

I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the floor too, my knees pulled up, the note between my feet. Neither of us says another word. I hate that it feels like the old nights, when he’d wait outside the operating room with warm coffee and I’d walk out exhausted to find him asleep against the wall.

I hate that I know exactly how he’s sitting right now: head tipped back, eyes closed, one knee up, the way he sits when he is too tired to pretend he isn’t.

A baby’s heartbeat, a husband’s voice, a note under the door. In one day, my whole life has turned into things I can hear but can’t touch.

Then the elevator dings.

Footsteps. Fast. Familiar.

“Get away from her door.”

Elias.

“I’m not touching it,” Damien answers, calm.

“That’s not what I said.”

A scrape of fabric. Damien standing up. I press my ear to the wall, my heart in my throat.

“She told you she doesn’t want to see you,” Elias says. His voice is low and tight, a tone I’ve never heard from him. “She told you in front of two hundred people.”

“I know. I’m not knocking anymore.”

“You’re sitting in front of her apartment.”

“Yes.”

“That’s worse.”

“I know.”

A beat of silence. Then Damien asks, quieter, “Is she alright?”

“She’s exhausted. Stressed out of her mind. Thanks to you.”

“I’d have liked to hear that from her.”

“You lost the right to hear anything from her when you…”

“I know what I lost, Elias.” It’s the first time I’ve heard Damien’s voice crack. “I know exactly what I lost. You don’t have to say it.”

Silence again. Heavy. Dangerous.

“You’re a good man,” Damien says finally. “I’m not asking you to like me. I’m asking you to look after her.”

“I don’t need you to ask me that.”

“Then do it better than I did.”

I stop breathing.

Footsteps. This time they move away, steady and slow, down the corridor. The elevator doors open. Close.

A moment later there are three soft knocks, and a very different voice.

“Serena? It’s me. It’s just me.”

I open the door.

Elias is standing there with a paper bag from the hospital in one hand and his keys in the other. His eyes go straight to my face, then to the floor, then to the folded paper by my feet.

“He was here the whole time?” he asks.

“Almost an hour.”

“And you didn’t open it.”

“No.”

Something shifts in his expression. Relief, maybe. Or something more complicated that I don’t have the strength to read.

“Good,” he says. “That’s good.”

“He asked me not to go back to my parents’ house,” I say. “Why would he say that?”

“Maybe he’s afraid you’ll tell them what you saw. Maybe he’s trying to control the story.”

It’s a reasonable answer. It should satisfy me.

It doesn’t.

I bend down and pick up the note. It’s a page torn from a prescription pad, the Hartwell Hospital logo printed at the top, and across the middle is Damien’s handwriting, the neat, slanting letters I know better than my own.

Don’t take anything your mother gives you.

That’s all. No signature. No apology.

I read it three times.

“What is it?” Elias asks, stepping closer.

I show him. He reads it, and his face goes strangely still, the way it did when he looked at the screen earlier. Then he smooths it over so fast I almost think I imagined it.

“Cryptic,” he says lightly. “Typical Damien. Don’t let it get to you.”

“My mother has never given me anything,” I say slowly, “except…”

I stop.

My feet are moving before I decide to move them. I cross the room to the chair where I dropped my bag and dig through it, shoving aside my wallet, my badge, the useless phone.

My fingers close around something small and cold.

An amber glass bottle. Nearly full.

The tonic.

Three years of it. Every single morning, one capful, the way my mother always insisted. “You’re so pale, Serena. You work too hard. Your health comes first.” She had a driver bring me a fresh bottle every month so I’d never run out. I thought it was love. I thought it was the only way she knew how to show it.

My last dose was the morning of the ceremony.

I stare at the label. There is no pharmacy name, no printed ingredients. Only a handwritten line in blue ink, in a doctor’s hurried script.

Dr. R. Pierce.

Behind me, Elias has stopped moving.

And against my stomach, where my free hand rests, my fingers go cold.