Loving Him Was My Punishment novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Kitchen Door

Finbar proves the vitamins are sedatives, Hazel flushes them, and a figure waits under a streetlamp all night until Marguerite arrives at seven with a doctor and two men.

Finbar drove with both hands on the wheel and did not speak until we were off the harbor road.

I held my bag in my lap and counted the streetlights to keep my hands still.

"Say it," I said. "Whatever you didn't say in there."

"Open the silver case," he said.

It was in the side pocket, where Marguerite had tucked it that morning.

Inside lay a row of small white tablets, each stamped with a number and a letter.

Finbar pulled into a gas station, took one, and held his phone over it with the screen light on.

"That's not a vitamin," he said. "It's a sedative. A strong one."

I stared at the tablet in his palm.

For nine mornings I had felt slow and heavy, and I had thought it was jet lag.

"She said the doctors ordered it," I said.

"Which doctors?" Finbar asked. "Hazel, I'm not saying this to scare you. I'm saying it because nobody will say it to you."

His voice cracked on my name.

I put the case on the dashboard and did not touch it again.

"Tell me about Brightwater," I said.

"You remember the name?"

"I remember a white corridor with a green line on the floor. I remember being cold." I held up my wrist. "I remember a strap."

Finbar drove on.

"I was twenty-one when I found the first bill," he said. "It was in Dad's desk. It said Brightwater Institute, Lausanne, and a figure with too many zeros. Marguerite told everyone you were at a school for girls who'd had a hard time."

"A school."

"I wrote to them four times. The fifth time a nurse wrote back, one line: Ask who is paying. Then nothing."

"Who was paying?"

He did not answer that. He turned on his signal and took the next left.

"I'm not holding it back to be cruel," he said. "I can't prove it yet, and you've been home nine days. I won't hand you a guess you'll have to carry."

I wanted to push, but the tablets were still on the dashboard, and the heaviness in my head was something real I could point to for the first time.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"My place. She doesn't know the address."

"You live over a bicycle shop?"

"There's a lock on the door," he said. "She doesn't have the key."

His flat had two rooms and a couch with a blanket folded over the arm.

He gave me his bed and slept on the couch, and neither of us argued about it.

I took the silver case into the bathroom, shook every tablet into the toilet and flushed it twice.

Then I stood at the window with the lights off.

The street below was empty except for a bus shelter and one tall figure under a lamp across the road.

He wore a long dark coat.

I couldn't see his face, only that he stood still, with his hands in his pockets, looking up at this building.

My hands went cold. My vision narrowed at the edges.

I held on to the window frame and breathed in through my nose, the way a nurse once taught me, and counted to eight.

My phone buzzed on the sill.

It was a number I did not know.

The text said: I'm across the street. I won't come up. I only wanted to see that you got inside safely.

I read it three times.

It did not sound like a man who had told my family to ship me out of the country.

That didn't make me trust it. It made me want to know what had been done to me, and by whom.

"Finbar," I said.

He appeared in the doorway in his socks, hair flattened on one side.

"Did you give him this number?"

Finbar looked at the screen, then at the floor.

"Don't answer it," he said.

That was not a no.

"I'll sort it out in the morning," he said. "Please. Sleep."

I lay down in his bed with my shoes on and did not sleep.

Around four the figure under the lamp was still there.

At six I looked again and the lamp was lit over nobody.

I was dozing when the door buzzer went off, long and steady, at seven.

Finbar got there first.

He looked through the peephole and went pale.

"Don't open it," he said.

"Who is it?"

Then I heard her through the wood, kind and carrying, the voice she used on waiters and donors.

"Hazel? Sweetheart, it's Marguerite. I've brought someone to help."

Through the peephole's small round lens I saw her cream coat.

Beside her stood a man in a grey overcoat, holding a leather medical bag.

Behind them, on the landing, two men in dark jackets waited with their hands folded in front of them.

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