What We Choose novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Drains

I didn't wake Colter.

He'd been awake for thirty hours.

I swung my legs off the bed the way the physical therapist had shown me, without using my arms.

The drains swung against my hips.

The nurse frowned. "You shouldn't be up on your own."

"Then walk with me," I said. "It's twenty feet."

She looked at the vase, then at my face, and held out her elbow.

I picked up the flowers with one hand. They were heavy. Everything above my ribs pulled.

I carried them out anyway.

Sienna was sitting in a visitor chair across from the nurses' station with her legs crossed, in the white coat, scrolling her phone.

She looked up and saw me.

The gown. The drains. The binder flat across my chest.

She smiled slowly, the whole way.

"Well," she said. "Look at you."

Two nurses at the station stopped typing.

"You sent these," I said.

"From all of us at Bayline."

"You don't work at Bayline. He fired you in front of the whole town two weeks ago."

She shrugged one shoulder. "I still have a company card in my wallet. Nobody's cut it up yet."

The charge nurse, behind the desk, put her pen down.

Sienna stood. She was a head taller than me, in heels.

"I came to make you an offer," she said, low and friendly, like a secret. "You're going to need money. No job, no family, no chest. Colter's going to get bored, and then where are you?"

"Get to the offer."

"There's a clause in my prenup." She took a folded paper out of her coat. "If he cheated first, I get the house on the point. All you have to do is sign that you two were together before the ribbon-cutting. I'll split it with you. Half."

She held the paper out between two fingers.

"That's real money, Dessa. For a girl with nothing."

I set the vase down on the nurses' counter.

The water sloshed.

"No," I said.

"Think about it."

"I don't need to think about it. I've got a better offer." I took my phone out of the pocket of my gown. "Remember the thread? The one you showed me in room twelve?"

Her smile stayed. Her eyes didn't.

"I forwarded it to myself. June ninth to now." I scrolled to the top so she could see it. "Come home, Nashy. That's the first message. A week before his interview. Then the key in your purse."

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