Seven Years Waiting for a Fake Marriage novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Stairwell

I crouched in front of Sam on the gravel path, and my stomach pulled, and I stayed down anyway.

"I'm not in a drawer," I said. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

"Mom hid you."

"She did. That's finished."

He looked at Lorna, who was standing with her fingers pressed against her lips.

"Okay," he said, and took my hand, and we walked back to the bench.

She went home at two, as agreed.

She said thank you once, quietly, to the air in front of her.

On Thursday my chair at the clinic had a different nurse in it, a tall man with a clipboard, and I was almost relieved.

Hannah wasn't on my floor anymore, and I told myself that was what I wanted.

At the end of the session I went looking for the washroom and took a wrong turn into the back hall by the stairwell.

I heard her before I saw her.

"No," she was saying. "I know what I told you. I know. I can't stay in Seaview."

She stood just inside the stairwell door with her phone against her ear and her free hand over her eyes.

"It's been a month, and I can't," she said. "I'll tell you by Friday."

I stood very still.

It was one more person leaving, and the thought moved through me so easily that I knew it had been waiting there for years.

She lowered the phone and turned and saw me.

"Elliot."

"Go, then," I said.

"What?"

"Go. I'm sure there's a good hospital somewhere else." I heard my own voice, flat and polite, the voice I had used on the phone to a field station for seven years. "You don't owe me anything. I told you to leave once already. Do it."

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