True Heiress Never Lies! novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Wrist

My father hung up on the silence.

He stood there with the phone in his hand, and I watched him do arithmetic.

He was a numbers man.

It was what he was good at.

The numbers had never added up, and now he could see why.

"Get your coat," he said.

"Gordon," Estelle said. "It's ten o'clock."

"Get your coat, Sonia."

"Where are we going?"

"The hospital."

"She's fine," Estelle said. "Gordon, honestly. You're being manipulated by a child."

He turned and looked at her.

It wasn't an angry look.

It was the look of a man seeing a stranger in his kitchen.

"I'm going to take my daughter to the emergency room," he said. "You can stay or come."

She stayed, for the moment.

Peter watched us go from the stair rail, with his shoebox in his arms.

The emergency room at Fairview was nearly empty.

A nurse took one look at my arm and put me in a room at the end of the hall.

A doctor came in, a tall woman in blue scrubs, with her hair pulled tight.

"What happened here?" she said.

My father started to answer.

"Let her tell it," the doctor said.

I held out the wrist.

"It broke in April, a year and a half ago. A staff member twisted it behind my back.

"Nobody ever looked at it after that."

She picked up the arm and turned it in the light.

"Mm," she said.

She pressed along the bone with her thumb, and I flinched.

"Healed wrong. It's called a malunion. We'll image it, but I can tell you what I'm going to see."

Her eyes traveled up the burns, and the bruises, and the mark on my shoulder.

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