Page 30 of Unwell
Nancy leaned closer, her forehead resting against mine. ‘Then he’s an idiot.’
I forced words past the lump in my throat, needing to get Elijah out of my head.
‘Who do you think left the rat in my room? They ruined my ribbons. I need my ribbons.’
Nancy smoothed my damp hair back from my forehead before planting the softest kiss right at the edge of my lips.
‘I’ll bring you more ribbons,’ she promised.
Despite the promise, Nancy’s eyes snagged on my leaking nipples and swollen stomach, filled with a familiar hunger. The hunger that Elijah often looked at me with when I was younger. Before he’d convinced mama to let him have me. Before mama had swapped my childhood for his coin.
Her kindness warmed me, yet left me shivering in the cooling water.
EIGHTEEN
NANCY
The packet of ribbons lay in my lap as I sat in the car, my fingers clutching the crinkled brown paper bag tight.
It had taken days to find the right ribbons in that perfect baby pink. Soft, butterfly satin. So clean compared to the bloodied, soiled ones I’d buried with the rat.
My pulse quickened just looking at them, remembering Ginny’s face when I’d promised them to her and the way she had trembled under my hands.
I shouldn’t have touched her like I did. It was crossing a professional boundary. I knew it. But being able to see life blossoming in her so close up had blurred my thoughts. To touch thenaked swell of her stomach and see her breasts dripping milk had done something to me. Something I couldn’t name.
I’d imagined that it was me. That it was my body heavy with child and my nipples leaking. That the warm, greasy milk was something I’d produced. That my babies hadn’t died before I even looked anything other than bloated.
The sound of the car door closing pulled me back to the present. Robert slid in behind the wheel, glancing at the packet of ribbons before lighting his cigarette.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ he said.
‘She’s in the low-risk ward,’ I countered. ‘The high-risk patients can’t get into her room.’
On the upper floors, in the high-risk wards, anything that looked remotely like it could be used to bind was strictly forbidden. Unless in the hands of the doctors, of course.
He gave me a look that oozed with derision.
‘You think I give a fuck if someone offs themselves? It’s less money, that’s all. Assuming someone tells the family, anyway.’ Where had the man I’d fallen for gone? The man who went to medical school to try to help people.
‘Why are you being so horrid?’ I asked.
‘You say someone is tormenting the girl. And yet you’re providing more ammunition. Assuming it’s true. Do you want more dead rats? Or what if it’s around the girl’s throat next time? What about the baby?’
A note of sadness tinged his words, yet I didn’t believe a second of it.
I bit my tongue to stop barking back at him while tucking the ribbon poking out back into the bag.
There was no point arguing.
He’d already decided what kind of man he was.
By the time we got inside, I’d pulled my veneer of professionalism back in place. Patients shuffled past in drug-induced hazes. Doctors were rarely seen. And the stink of bleach and sweat and despair settling over me like a cloak.
Larry sat by the corridor wall with his big shoulders hunched. Crumbled bits of cheese surrounded him. Carefully piled dairy towers in a circle around him.
‘Are you okay, Larry?’ I paused beside him, the paper bag rustling in my fingers
His stricken face lifted. ‘No. My friends are gone.’
