Page 43 of Every Broken Piece
She blinks at the questions that machine gun fire out of me. “I’ll tell you but let’s walk.” She grabs my hand and we’re off again, briskly moving down the hallway to a different set of elevators. Amelia stabs the up button, her toe tapping as she gnaws on her lower lip.
“Saturday was her birthday. We went out to celebrate.” She glances behind her like she’s afraid someone’s following. I look too but it’s only the two of us at the bank of elevators. “Tess doesn’t have any family,” she continues. “Just me and she’s only reluctantly let me claim her.” She frowns as she looks over her shoulder again.
Why didn’t I know Saturday was Tess’s birthday? I would have at least wished her a happy birthday. I would have...I don’t know, done something. She was fuckingattackedon herbirthday. Somehow that makes everything worse and my vengeance tenfold.
“Who attacked her?” I ask. “Have the police caught him?”
Amelia jams the lit button again like that’s going to make the elevator arrive faster. “We don’t know who attacked her,” she says. “And I don’t know if they caught him. The police haven’t been forthcoming with information.”
I can fix that, especially now that I’m established as her fiancé, but also, in this situation I don’t have problems throwing my weight and name around to get answers.
“Tess doesn’t remember anything about the attack,” Amelia’s saying. “But they say that’s normal for her injury.”
The elevator doors swish open but I’m glued to the floor, locked into place. “Her injury?”
Amelia slaps a hand on the door opening to keep it from shutting me out. “You don’t know?”
It takes everything I have to make my head move back and forth because my throat's closed up and no words will form.
Amelia’s eyes fill with tears. “You really like her, don’t you?”
“I...” I clear my throat because her question catches me off guard. “She’s become a good friend.” But those words aren’t adequate to describe feelings for a woman I’ve never met in person, whose voice I’ve never heard. If I can’t describe how I feel to myself, I certainly can’t describe it to Amelia. But she seems to accept my answer and motions me into the elevator, pressing the button for the eleventh floor when I step in.
She leans against the wall, her fey like eyes seeing right through me. “She never carried her work phone with her on the weekends until she started texting you.”
“What does that mean?”
The elevator stops and an older couple step on. I move closer to Amelia without breaking eye contact.
“That means you were special to her,” she says softly, glancing quickly at the couple whose backs are to us as they face the doors.
They exit on the sixth floor, and we’re left alone again.
Amelia waits until the doors close. “She has a concussion. Bruised ribs. A sprained wrist. She was beat up bad, Mr. Strong. Real bad.”
I picture Tess bruised, bleeding, broken and clear my throat because I won’t cry in front of this girl who’s held it together for her friend. “Thank you,” I say softly. “For telling them I’m her fiancé so I can see her.”
“That’s not why I did it.”
I wait as her throat works, her emotions finally getting the best of her as tears spring to eyes glued to the rising numbers that are taking us closer to Tess.
“Then why?” I finally ask after three floors go by.
She flicks a glance at me. “That woman yelling at the guards? I don’t know who she is, but she was here to see Tess.”
“That crazy ass woman out there was here to see Tess? Why?”
But I know why. She was yelling loud enough for everyone in the lobby to hear, demanding to see herdaughter. A mother has rights, she’d said.
“You said Tess doesn’t have family,” I say.
“Because Tess told me she doesn’t have family.”
I’m trying to reconcile the blonde, strung out woman in the lobby to the picture of Tess that I have in my phone.
Amelia is chewing on her lip as she watches the floor numbers grind closer to eleven. “Tess told me once that it’s just her. I guess I assumed that meant she doesn’t have family. So, when this woman showed up demanding to see her, I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know if she’s Tess’s mom or not, but if she is, I know Tess wouldn’t want her here.” She raises her thin shoulders in a shrug. “Then you were there and I just... I just did what I thought I should to protect Tess.”
The doors slide open into an empty, dark, waiting room.
