Chapter 5 Chapter 5: Whispers in the Shadow

I stayed with my hands over my face until my arm went numb against the armrest, and when I finally lowered them and looked back at the bed, Ethan’s eyelid was as still as the rest of him.

Ten years in emergency care, Laura, and now you’re going to start believing in miracles just because it’s convenient.

I lay down on the couch without taking off my uniform and fell asleep to the sound of the monitor, and when I opened my eyes, there was already gray light behind the curtain, and the house was still so quiet that I missed the noise of my neighborhood, people running after the bus at that hour. Here, the only thing running was the water in a pool nobody used.

I changed his IV at seven twenty, took his blood pressure, recorded his condition on the chart, opened the curtain, and pulled the couch closer to the bed with my knee, holding my coffee in one hand and an old novel under my arm.

"Good morning, Ethan. Today we’re reading a mystery novel, one my mother gave me and that I’ve had for eight years without finishing. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry for you, because I’m going to read it to you anyway."

I waited for the second when a normal patient would have laughed, knowing it wasn’t going to come. That’s the stupid part about talking to someone in a coma: you still leave pauses.

I read two chapters aloud. I was halfway through the third when there were two knocks on the door.

"Come in."

Derek entered with the same death-certificate expression he’d had the day he picked me up from the hospital. He was young, and somehow he still managed to be colder than my husband, who had been unconscious for six months.

"Mrs. Cavalier. How is the boss this morning?"

"Stable."

"Is he going to wake up?"

"Derek, I’m not a doctor."

"I’m asking you as a nurse."

I closed the book with my finger between the pages.

"He has everything he needs to wake up. If he hasn’t, it’s because he doesn’t want to yet."

He nodded once, as if he had just written my answer down somewhere.

"We need him awake, ma’am. Soon."

"Soon for what?"

He took long enough to answer that I knew the delay itself was the answer.

"Because while he sleeps, someone else is in charge of this house."

He left without adding anything, just as he had entered, leaving me with cold coffee in my hand and that sentence going around in my head, because I had been in that house for three days and already knew who the other person was.

I didn’t even get to open the book. The door flew open, and a woman walked in the way air rushes in when someone breaks a window: blonde, somewhere in her thirties, her dress clinging to her body, and her makeup applied with the generous hand of someone getting dressed for a hospital visit as if it were a date.

"Ethan."

She sat on the edge of the bed without looking at me, leaned over, and kissed his forehead with a familiarity that had taken me three days to earn.

"Love. My love. I’m here."

She began running her fingers through his hair. I stood up from the couch.

"Ma’am. Who let you in?"

That was when she looked at me, from my shoes to my bun, without getting up.

"And who are you?"

"The nurse. And I’m going to ask you to leave. Mr. Cavalier is recovering."

"I know he’s recovering. I’ve been going to see him at the hospital four days a week for months. Don’t come explaining to me what he needs."

She turned back toward the bed and took his face in both hands.

"Love, look what they did to you. When you wake up, we’ll fix everything. I’ll wait for you, okay?"

The monitor started climbing. Eighty. Ninety. Ninety-five.

He can hear you. Of course he can hear you, and he doesn’t like it.

"Ma’am, the patient’s heart rate is rising. Leave."

"Don’t give me that crap."

"Now."

I put my hand on her shoulder to pull her away from the bed, and she sprang to her feet, so close that I could smell her sweet perfume over the scent of disinfectant.

"Don’t touch me."

"Leave the room."

"Or what?"

"Or I’ll throw you out."

"Go ahead."

The slap came without warning, heat shooting from my cheek to my ears and leaving a thin ringing in my ear, and while my face was still turned away, she smiled with that crooked mouth of women who expect you to start crying.

I slapped her back with my whole arm.

That one sounded louder.

She stumbled back two steps, one hand pressed to her cheek, as if someone had changed the script halfway through the scene.

"Goddamn..."

She lunged at me. I grabbed her by the wrists, and we struggled against the foot of the bed, with the monitor beeping above both of us as if it were counting the rounds.

The door opened. Marcela came in with Gloria behind her.

"Vanessa. Let her go."

Vanessa released me immediately and fixed her hair with her fingers without looking at her.

"Marcela, this woman hit me."

"I saw you hit her first. Don’t lie to my face inside my own house."

Marcela dragged her into the hallway by the arm, without raising her voice and without giving her time to tell a second lie, and Gloria closed the door behind them. I stood in the middle of the room with my pulse higher than his. The monitor slowly dropped to eighty-two.

I put my hand on Ethan’s forehead.

"Okay. Okay. She’s gone."

I was sitting down on the couch again when there was another knock.

If it’s her again, I’ll kill her and let them charge my mother’s heart on the bill.

"Come in."

A maid entered carrying a tray.

"Ma’am, I brought you some tea. Gloria says it’s for your nerves."

"Leave it on the table."

But she didn’t leave it there. She walked toward the couch with the tray in both hands, and when she was standing over me, she made a quick turn of her wrist and the cup tipped over.

The tea spilled over my shoulder and chest before I could jerk backward. I jumped to my feet, peeled the scalding fabric away with two fingers, and let out a scream that would have gotten me reprimanded in the emergency room.

"Fuck!"

"Ma’am, it slipped, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t fire me!"

I stared at her with my uniform clinging to me and my shoulder throbbing.

"It slipped?"

"I swear!"

"A cup doesn’t slip sideways. What’s your name?"

"Beatriz, ma’am."

"Beatriz. Look me in the eyes."

She looked at me with her eyes wide open, round and rehearsed.

"You threw that tea on me on purpose."

"Ma’am, how could you think that?"

"I’ve spent ten years treating burn victims in the emergency room. I know how liquid falls when someone trips and how it falls when someone throws it. And besides, who would believe me? I’m just the nurse here."

Her face went blank for one second. Just one. But I saw it.

"I didn’t say that, ma’am."

"You didn’t have to. Get out of this room, Beatriz. And tell whoever sent you that next time, they should send someone who knows how to disguise themselves better."

She practically ran out, leaving the broken cup on the floor, and that was when I was completely sure, because a good maid cleans up whatever she spills even while someone is yelling at her.

I went into the bathroom, turned on the cold water, and held my shoulder under the stream until I could no longer feel my skin. In the mirror, my cheek was marked from the slap, and my shoulder was swelling with a red patch the size of my palm. All on the same side.

I must have killed a priest in another life. There’s no other explanation.

I went back into the room and changed out of my wet uniform in front of my sleeping husband. He’d have to forgive me, but I had no intention of walking across the entire mansion soaking wet just to preserve the modesty of a man who had never even looked at me.

"Ethan, listen carefully. A maid who looks stupid but isn’t just left here, and she deliberately threw boiling tea on me. Your brother wants to know how long it will take you to die, and your mistress just slapped me. This house is a fucking nightmare, and I’ve been inside it for three days."

I placed my hand on his wrist and waited longer than I was willing to admit.

"If you woke up right now, I’d hit you too."

Eighty-two. Eighty-three. Eighty-two.

I opened the novel and read him another chapter in a low voice, until the letters began moving on their own.

Voices in the garden woke me.

I had fallen asleep on the couch with the book in my lap and a blanket over me that I hadn’t put there myself. Four ten in the morning. My neck hurt, and my shoulder burned beneath the gauze.

Outside, men were giving short orders and a woman was screaming without words, that open-throated scream you learn to recognize in the emergency room.

I checked Ethan’s monitor—stable—and walked barefoot into the hallway.

Gloria intercepted me at the bottom of the service stairs, wearing her robe backward.

"Ma’am. Go upstairs."

"Gloria, what’s happening?"

"Please, go upstairs."

"Gloria."

She took a deep breath before letting it out.

"They found a girl in the pool."

"Dead?"

"Dead."

I walked out onto the terrace without asking permission. The garden floodlights had been turned on, the water was white with light, and in the middle of it floated a body facedown, dressed in a black uniform, her hair spread around her head. Two guards were trying to pull her toward the edge with a pool-cleaning hook.

Derek stood beside the pool with his arms crossed. He crossed the terrace toward me before I could take a third step.

"Ma’am. Go back to the room."

"What happened?"

"We don’t know yet."

"Did she fall?"

He didn’t answer that.

"Go back to the room. Please."

I caught sight of her face when the guards turned her over in the water, and it was the girl from the tea.

I went upstairs. I sat on the edge of my husband’s bed, and he was still the same, his eyes closed and the monitor at eighty-two, as if no one had just been floating in that house.

"Ethan. What the hell did I get myself into when I agreed to be your wife?"

Nothing.

I placed my hand on his forehead and continued the count I had started on the terrace: in that entire mansion, the only person who had argued with Beatriz loudly, with the door open and witnesses in the hallway, was me. Eight hours before they pulled her out of the water with a hook.

And Derek, standing at the edge of the pool, wasn’t looking at the body.

He was looking at me.