Page 120 of Tell Me Why
“Absolutely not. We’re meeting him. Out to the car, okay?”
Tina leaned on him harder, considering the distance.
It was Ginger’s house, she recognized it now, though she hadn’t spent much time down in the basement.
She had to go up the stairs, out the door, and to the driveway.
It was a trivial distance, under most circumstances, but now it felt like an athletic feat on the back of a weeks-long head cold.
“You need to get things moving through you again,” Tell said gently as she slid to her feet. “It’s probably going to take more surgeries to get stuff out that is going to take longer than it’s worth to recover. Better to start from nothing.”
Tina opened her mouth to speak, then looked at him and frowned.
“What must a real doctor think, looking at you?” she asked. “You keep trying to heal the whole time he’s trying to perform surgery?”
“Try to avoid it as we can,” he said with humor. “You have walking?”
She tried to hold on to his arms more tightly, but there was no more strength to give.
“Tony will help me,” she said, and Tell nodded.
“I know,” he said. “But we’re not going to discuss him any further. Yes?”
Oh.
Yeah.
There were secrets, there.
She nodded.
Tell cinched up his grip on her, lifting her arm higher and getting an arm around her ribs as she tried to remember whose feet she was wearing.
She looked down at her toes.
“I had shoes, before,” she said. “Cute ones.”
“Not when I found you,” Tell said.
She looked at him.
“You came back,” she said, and he nodded.
“Always.”
She drew a breath, finding her lungs were full of sludge that needed to be coughed out.
That could wait.
Lungs were just for dramatic purposes, after all.
“You’ve got this,” he said. “But you need to do it.”
She’d sat up, but at this point she couldn’t remember how she’d done it. Everything inside of her did feel stiff and jellied, unresponsive and foreign.
“They’ve made meat of me,” she said.
“They tried,” Tell said. “Fight it.”
