Four Men Thought I Was Unconscious, Now They Wait for My Yes novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Half a Pill

Lena fakes a blank memory at breakfast, finds the cut sleeping pills, and Vincent tells her to pour tonight's wine away and do it all again.

At seven the next morning I walked into the kitchen with my hair in a knot and made my face as blank as I could.

Dominik stood at the stove with his back to me, turning eggs.

He did not turn around right away.

"There she is," he said at last. "How's the birthday girl?"

"Awful," I said. I dropped into a chair and put my head in my hands. "What happened to me?"

Florian leaned against the counter with a mug, grinning.

"You had three glasses and went down hard," he said. "Dominik carried you up. You were a hero about it."

"I only remember the cake."

"You remember nothing else?" Dominik asked.

He said it lightly, and his hand stopped moving on the spatula.

"Should I?"

Nobody answered.

Felix sat at the end of the table with his laptop open and did not look up from it. He had not typed a single word since I came in.

Dominik slid a plate of eggs in front of me.

His fingers brushed my knuckles, and the same fingers had been inside me eight hours ago.

I felt it low in my stomach and kept my face still.

"Eat," he said. "You'll feel better."

I looked at the eggs. I thought about the aspirin taste and pushed the plate an inch away.

"I'm not hungry. I think I'll just have coffee."

Something moved across his face and was gone.

"Of course," Dominik said. "Whatever you need."

I did not see Vincent. His coat was gone from the hook, and his shoes were gone from the mat.

I drank my coffee and let Florian tell me a long story about a tourist who had fallen off the dock.

Every time Dominik passed behind my chair, I felt him slow down.

When they finally scattered to their jobs, I stayed at the table until the front door had closed three times.

Then I opened the drawer by the stove.

I had seen Dominik put something there at the party, a small brown bottle behind the tea bags.

It was a prescription bottle with a white label.

D. Reuter. Sleeping tablets. One at night, as needed.

The bottle was nearly full.

Beside it lay a pill-cutter, the kind you buy at a pharmacy for elderly relatives.

Five tablets sat inside the cutter's little tray. All five had been cut in half.

I turned one half over in my fingers.

It was white and chalky and small, and it was just what I had tasted in the wine.

I counted. Ten halves. Five whole pills had been cut in two.

I could not make that add up. Dominik had said he measured the dose by my weight. A man who wanted me flat on my back would cut nothing.

Someone had cut every one of them.

"Don't touch those."

I spun around so fast the chair scraped.

Vincent stood in the kitchen doorway in his uniform, with his keys in his hand.

He had not left for work at all. His coat had been in the van.

"I'm just looking for the aspirin," I said.

"Lena." He crossed the kitchen in three steps and closed the drawer with his palm. He did not slam it. "Put it back."

I opened my hand. The half pill lay in my palm.

He took it from me carefully, and his fingertips touched my wrist. They rested exactly where they had rested last night.

"You counted my pulse," I said, before I could stop myself.

His face did not change.

Then it did. Something in it went quiet and alert, and he glanced once at the window to check the yard.

"I count everybody's pulse," he said. "It's my job."

"That's not an answer."

"No," Vincent said. "It isn't."

A truck passed on the road outside. We both waited until the engine faded.

He stepped closer, and he lowered his voice until it was barely a breath.

"Tonight there will be dinner. Dominik will pour your wine himself."

I stared at him.

"Drink nothing," Vincent said. "Take the glass, lift it, put it to your mouth. Then pour it somewhere, and go upstairs."

"And then what?"

"Then you do what you did last night."

My throat closed.

He knew. He had known from the first, and he was telling me to do it again.

"Why?" I whispered. "Why would you tell me that? Why not stop them?"

For the first time he looked at the floor.

"Because if I stop them tonight, you'll never know which of us to be afraid of," he said. "And I need you to know."

He picked up his keys and went out through the front door.

I stood alone in the kitchen with my heart going hard and my wrist still warm.

Outside, on the porch, the fern was drying in the sun.

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