He Waited for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 42 of 48
Chapter 42: Orange Juice
I didn't sit back down.
"What else did he tell you?"
Shelby studied her bitten nails.
"He wanted the name of your doctor," she said. "As if I'd know. As if anybody in here gets the society pages."
"And you told him what?"
"That he'd find it himself. He always does."
The guard touched her shoulder, and she rose.
At the steel door she looked back.
"Eat carefully, Christina," she said, and went through.
Nicholas had the car cold when I got in.
I told him in four sentences.
He didn't start the engine for a long time.
Ten days later, on a Saturday, the pharmacy on Madison delivered my refill at a quarter to eight.
The same pharmacy had filled my prescriptions since I was twelve.
The bag sat on the kitchen counter, stapled shut, my name on the receipt.
Nicholas was making eggs in his bare feet.
He set a plate in front of me, and then a short glass of orange juice by my hand.
He had done it every morning since April.
I opened the new bottle and shook one prenatal vitamin into my palm.
Oval. Pale yellow. A line pressed down the middle.
I lifted it toward my mouth.
Then I looked at the orange juice beside my plate, and at the pill in my hand, and my arm stopped by itself.
Nicholas turned from the stove with the pan.
"Christina?"
"Get the old bottle. Upstairs. My nightstand."
He didn't ask why.
He came back with it and tipped one out beside the other on a white saucer.
We looked at them side by side.
The new one was a shade whiter.
The line down the middle sat a hair off center.
Nicholas carried the saucer to the window and held it up to the light, the way he held a slide.
"Different lot," he said. "Or a different pill."
"Which?"
"I don't know. I'd like someone who does to tell us."
My doctor answered her own phone on a Saturday.
"Don't swallow anything," she said. "Bring both bottles. Come now."
She met us at a side door on Park Avenue in tennis clothes, her red reading glasses on their chain.
She took the saucer from Nicholas without a word and sent it to the lab downstairs with a nurse who ran.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of He Waited for Fifteen Years are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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