Lover on Loop: Her Cruel Revenge Game novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Ninth Splint

June sets the hand and the surgeon warns the nerve will go next time. Asa decides not to wait. Darren has been asking which ward he's in.

The county hospital's X-ray room smelled like floor cleaner and old coffee, and I knew every tile in it.

June stood behind the surgeon's shoulder with her arms folded, still in her scrubs.

On the screen my right hand was a scatter of broken white lines.

"Four metacarpals," the surgeon said. "Two fingers. This is the ninth time I've seen this hand, Mr. Redfern."

"I know."

"You've told me it's a door every time. Sometimes a car door."

"Yes."

"I'm not asking who. I'm telling you what the film says."

He pointed his pen at a gray thread running down the wrist.

"That's the ulnar nerve. It has been bruised eight times and it is still working. Pin this hand again, break it again, and it will not work."

I looked at the thread.

I painted portraits for a living, and the nerve ran to my last two fingers and half my thumb.

"How many more breaks does it have?" I asked.

"None that I'd sign off on."

He left to book the operating room.

June pressed her lips together.

"Say it," I said.

"I don't want to say it. I want to take Darren's expensive gallery and put it through his front window."

"It isn't Darren's fault."

"You don't know that."

She said it to the X-ray, not to me.

They wheeled me into a curtained bay and she put an IV in my left arm with hands that didn't shake.

June had been setting my bones for two years.

She had not wanted to believe me the first time, either.

In the third round I had told her, the night before Greer broke my hand, three things Greer would say in the gallery, in order.

June had stood at the back of the room that evening and heard every one of them.

After that she never asked me to prove it again.

"Okay," she said now, taping the line down. "Tell me what's different."

"The lock screen."

"The thing only you can see."

"It's changed."

I held the phone where she could look at it, though she never could.

"It says LAST RESET," I told her. "And under that: what she holds on day ninety-one, she keeps."

June stood very still.

"So there isn't a ninth reset."

"There's no tenth. At the end of this one, Greer stays wherever she is."

"If she's still hating you on day ninety-one..."

"Then she hates me forever, I think."

"And if she's in love with you?"

"Then she's got that forever."

Neither of us said the other thing, which was that she would also keep her son's funeral morning.

I had never once been able to tell which one she would hold.

"You've always waited," June said. "Eight times you let her calm down, you let her come find you. It takes her what, three weeks?"

"Four."

"And then she falls for you on a timetable and proposes to you in a field full of fireflies in the middle of whatever month it is, and she wakes up the next morning not knowing you."

"Yes."

"So what do you want to do instead?"

I looked at the curtain.

"Walk into the greenhouse tomorrow with my arm in a cast."

"She'll break the other one."

"She might."

"Asa."

"If I wait ninety-one days to be picked up," I said, "I'll be sitting by the lake on day ninety-one with exactly what I've got now, and she'll hold that."

June stared at me for a long time.

Then she took my left hand and squeezed it, hard enough to hurt.

"You're not going alone."

"I am. She won't talk to you. You told her what you thought of her at the funeral."

"I'd say it again."

"I know. That's why."

Her phone buzzed on the cart.

She read the screen and her face changed.

"Darren," she said. "That's the second time."

"What does he want?"

"He called while you were in X-ray. He wanted to know which ward you'd be in tonight and whether you'd be staying over."

"He told us to come to the county hospital himself."

"He's never asked that." June turned the phone so I could see two missed calls and a text. "Since that night he hasn't set foot in your house once, Asa. He sent flowers every time. Why does he want to know where you'll be sleeping?"

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