What We Choose novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Bell

Nash

I watched it from my truck, with the engine running and the heat on high.

Dessa crossing the street in the dark with her bald head shining under the streetlight. Sienna did not see her until she was halfway over.

I couldn't hear what Sienna said.

I heard what Dessa said back. She said it loud enough for the whole street.

"You've been sitting in my ex's truck outside his mother's house on Thanksgiving. Which one of us got left for less?"

Colter opened the passenger door for her.

Dessa got in.

Sienna walked back down the sidewalk and climbed into my truck and slammed the door.

She didn't say anything all the way back to the Harborview.

Neither did I.

There was fourteen thousand nine hundred dollars missing from my life, and my father had walked it down the table himself.

Tuesday I called in to Bayline and said I had a site visit in Salem.

Nobody asked which site.

Nobody asked me anything at work anymore.

I'd been pending review for seven weeks, and they'd given me a desk by the copier.

I drove to Boston instead.

I knew which Tuesday it was.

I'd watched her circle all twelve in red in my passenger seat, in that garage.

The infusion room was on the fourth floor. I'd been walked out of it once, past every chair.

I didn't go in this time.

I stood at the glass doors at the end of the room, where the hall was dim, and looked.

She was in chair fourteen.

Bald. Thinner than at Thanksgiving. Wearing a pair of fuzzy socks with cartoon hot dogs on them.

Kenna was there, holding a poster board that said LAST ONE BITCHES in glitter glue.

Colter was there, standing by the IV pole.

The nurse unhooked the line from the bump in her chest and taped a little square of gauze over it.

Then the whole room started clapping.

Every chair and every nurse joined in.

The old lady in the silk scarf, in the next recliner, banged a spoon on her tray with her own bag still dripping.

Dessa got up.

She walked to the brass bell on the wall by the nurses' station.

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