Before I Forget His Name novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Glass on the Floor

The night before the wedding Livia seizes while packing and Adriano breaks in; she lies, and at dawn finds that he has read the pill label.

Adriano didn't come home until after midnight, the night before his wedding.

I was kneeling on my bedroom floor, wrapping my parents' wedding photograph in a soft cloth.

The smell of burning wood came back.

My right hand began to jerk before I could reach the medicine on the nightstand.

The glass of water slid out of my fingers and broke.

I tried to stand, and my legs gave out, and the corner of the bed hit my ribs.

When the room came back, Adriano had kicked the door open and was on one knee beside me.

"Livia. Look at me."

He held the back of my neck with one hand.

His voice was rough, and it had panic in it, which it hadn't had for me in six months.

I had bitten the side of my tongue, and blood was warm at the corner of my mouth.

Pills lay in the broken glass.

The prescription bottle had rolled against his knee with the label facing the floor.

If he turned it over, it was finished.

I grabbed it first and shoved it into the medical case under my bed.

"It was a migraine," I said. "I stood up too fast."

His face closed.

"A migraine."

"Yes."

"With a bitten tongue and a broken glass and a door you'd locked."

"I always lock it."

"I know you do."

He took his thumb and wiped the blood from the corner of my lip.

It was the first time he had touched my face in six months.

His hand was shaking.

That was anger, I decided.

"Look at the floor," I said. "You're kneeling in glass."

"I don't care."

He lifted me off the rug and put me on the bed in one movement.

He didn't ask.

His arms went under my knees and my back, and I felt him notice how little there was of me.

"You've lost weight," he said.

"I've been busy."

"Doing what?"

"Having dinner with Philip."

His jaw tightened.

I had said it on purpose, and it worked.

He crouched and picked the larger pieces of glass out of the rug and set them in his palm.

A shard cut him. He looked at the blood on his hand and did nothing about it.

"Tomorrow is the wedding," I said. "You should go to bed."

"I know what tomorrow is."

"Then go."

"So this is what you decided." He stood with the glass in his bleeding hand. "You'd rather lie to my face than say one true thing to me."

"That's rich."

"Is it?"

"You answered my text at two in the morning with a rule," I said. "I think I'm allowed a migraine."

That landed.

He opened his mouth and shut it again.

I waited for him to say what he had never said.

He didn't, and he wasn't going to.

"Sleep," he said.

I didn't say what I wanted to say, which was that I'd sleep if he stayed.

He dropped the glass into the wastebasket and turned off the lamp.

The door closed behind him, but his footsteps didn't leave.

I heard the floorboard outside my room creak once.

Then he sat down on the hall floor with his back against my door, and the wood took his weight.

I lay in the dark and listened to a man guarding a girl he had told to stay away.

My tongue hurt. My ribs hurt.

My lip still felt the place where his thumb had been, and I kept touching it myself.

My phone lit up on the nightstand.

It was Philip. "Flying out behind you Sunday. Please don't do anything brave before then."

I wrote back, "I'm too tired to be brave."

I didn't sleep until nearly three.

At four I got up.

The crates were already gone.

My last bag was packed and waiting inside the closet, with my passport in the front pocket.

I opened the medical case on the floor to take my anticonvulsants for the plane.

I always shut it with the left clasp first and put the bottle in with the label turned to the wall.

Tonight the right clasp had been closed over the left.

The bottle lay with its label facing up.

He had read it while I slept.

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