Page 28 of A Taste like Sin
“Hello?” Diane picks up on the first ring. “Juliana?”
“What’s going on?”
“Oh, thank God! I told him to tell you sooner, but he didn’t want to worry you. And now I don’t know
what we’re going to do. The doctors don’t—”
“Slow down,” I urge. “I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”
“Your father is in the hospital,” she says. “He had a stroke. Juliana… It’s not good. Please come…”
The phone falls from my grasp, sliding across the floor as the world dips in and out of focus. One
minute, I’m standing; the next, I’m on my knees, supported only by a strong hand on my shoulder. Like
an anchor, a gruff voice sinks through the chaos of my thoughts, tethering me to reality.
“I’ll take you there,” Damien says, though I don’t even remember asking him to out loud, let alone
saying anything. “I’ve got you.”
Even now, whenever I picture Heyworth Thorne, it’s always as he was the day we met: a knight
in shining armor, rescuing me from a nightmare. I’d been sedated that morning, three days after
Simon’s attack. Lying tucked beneath the stale, stiff blankets of a hospital bed, draped in tubes and
wires meant to monitor my vital signs, I never felt more alone. My mother and father hadn’t been to
see me. Besides the police, doctors, and the average nurse, no one had.
I think my case manager back then explained the fact away with some spiel about reducing stimulus to
help me adjust.
But I knew the truth they had been too polite to say: Leslie was dead. I wasn’t. And while the
townspeople may have crowed their relief to the local papers, few of them could look me in the eye.
Until he came, Heyworth Thorne. A pudgy, stout man with thinning brown hair, wearing a green suit
that stretched at the middle. He stood tall despite the diminutive size, carrying himself like someone
who mattered. Someone important.
Asked to consult on my case by the local police chief himself, he entered my hospital room with little
more than a teddy bear and a strained smile. There was something rare tucked into the corners of his
mouth though: genuine concern.
“Hello, Juliana,” he said, dropping the crisp, polite tone everyone else used around me. His was
blunter. Honest. “I know that nothing I could say would ever be good enough, or empathetic
enough…” He cleared his throat and nodded to my empty bedside table. “So would you prefer we
skip the introductions and I smuggle you some ice cream from the parlor down the street?”
