She Discovered Too Late novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Room I Used to Have

My old bedroom is Colby's gym, and on the landing he tells me, smiling, exactly what he did and what will happen when I'm gone.

Arlene drove me to Alder Road that afternoon with all my things in two grocery bags.

The house at number forty-one still had the white porch and the brick steps my father poured himself.

My mother's rose bushes were gone. Someone had put gravel where they used to be.

The housekeeper opened the door before we knocked.

She had worked for us since I was nine. She put both hands over her mouth when she saw me.

"Oh, Cedric," she said. "Look how thin."

"Hello," I said. "You haven't changed."

She cried a little, and she hugged Arlene too, by accident, and Arlene let her.

Colby came down the front hall with his arms wide.

"There he is. Miriam had to go back to the office, but I said I'd show you up."

He put his hand on my back and steered me to the stairs.

My old room was at the end of the second floor. The door was open.

There was a treadmill where my bed used to be. A rack of weights stood against the wall where I had taped my college acceptance letter.

"I'm going to be strong when the new liver comes," Colby said, warm and sheepish. "The trainer says the faster you recover, the better."

"I had to put something in here. I'm sorry. It was just sitting empty."

"It's fine," I said.

It was not fine, but the housekeeper stood in the hall with her eyes wet, so I let it be.

They gave me the guest room across the landing. Arlene got the room next to it.

She set my pill organizer on the night table and looked around the room once, slowly.

"Door locks from the inside," she said. "Good."

I ate a few spoonfuls of soup at the kitchen counter, and Miriam did not come home.

At nine I started up the stairs alone.

I took them one at a time, with the cane in my right hand and my left on the rail. My legs shook on every other step.

Halfway up I looked at the landing and saw Colby.

He was sitting on the top step in the dark with his knees up.

"Don't stop," he said softly. "You're doing great."

I climbed until I was two steps below him.

"The messages in the class group chat," he said. "I typed them on your phone while you were in the shower."

I stood very still.

"You always left it on the desk. Nobody ever read past the first message."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because it doesn't matter." He tipped his head back against the banister, easy and tired. "The exam was the best one. You wouldn't have thought a nineteen-year-old could plan something that clean."

"And the stairwell?"

"I only had to put my foot out." He smiled up at me. "She didn't even ask where the bruises came from."

"Miriam will ask now."

"She won't." He said it quietly, with a gentle sort of pity. "She believed me before I finished the first sentence, and every year since it has cost her more to change her mind."

"She needs me to be the one who did it, Cedric. If you didn't, then she threw you out for nothing, and she can't live with that."

"So she'll keep believing it. I'm her proof that she was right."

He stood up.

He took the cane out of my hand, gently.

"Let me help you with that."

I put my hand on the rail. The stairs fell away steeply behind me down to the marble.

Colby held the cane out over the drop.

"Brain tumors make people dizzy," he said. "Everybody knows that. Nobody would ever question it."

"I'm not dizzy," I said.

"You will be."

A tray clinked at the bottom of the stairs.

Arlene stood in the hall with my evening pills in a paper cup and her glasses on her nose.

She looked up at the two of us on the stairs and at the cane in his hand.

"Mr. Ellingham," she said, pleasantly, "that's his cane."

Colby laughed. "He dropped it. I was just giving it back."

He put it into my hand and patted my arm.

"Sleep well, brother."

He went up the rest of the stairs and down the hall, whistling.

Arlene came up and took my elbow. She did not say anything until we were in my room with the door locked.

Then she put the paper cup in my hand.

"He's going to do that again when I'm not looking," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"Then I won't ever not be looking."

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