He Asked Me to Die Again, So I Named My Price novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Aide

Calla wants to thank her donor without knowing it is Yvette, Dorothea hires Yvette as live-in companion, and Alaric tells her never to touch him.

At five in the morning the sixth floor was empty except for one lit room and one woman pushing a mop.

Yvette ran the mop down the corridor and tried not to look at the door marked R. STOUGHTON.

The door was open a hand's width.

"You're the one who hums," a voice said from inside.

Yvette stopped.

"I was not humming."

"You were. It was a lullaby, badly." A small laugh turned into a cough. "Come in. I'm not allowed to sleep, and everyone who checks my pulse tiptoes."

She pushed the door open.

Calla Stoughton sat propped up against four pillows with a tube in her arm and a monitor beside her.

Her curls were flat on one side. Her face was gray with tiredness and her eyes were wide awake.

She looked at Yvette's mop and bucket with open delight.

"Do you have a name?" she asked.

"Yvette."

Calla's smile slipped. "That was my companion's name. She quit the day of my surgery and never said goodbye."

"It is a common name," Yvette said.

"I suppose it is. I'm Calla. I got a new heart on Thursday." She said it lightly, and her hand pressed flat against her breastbone. "It beats weird. Do you want to feel?"

"No," Yvette said, too fast.

"That's fair. Nobody does." Calla let her hand fall. "They won't tell me who she was. The donor. Only that she was young and healthy and had no family to call."

Yvette gripped the mop handle.

"My brother thinks I should not ask," Calla went on. "He gets this look. But a person died so I could stay up at five in the morning insulting a stranger. I would like to say thank you to someone."

The words went into Yvette and stayed there.

Nobody had said them to her in six lives.

"I am sure she would be glad you are up," Yvette said.

"That's the nicest thing a cleaner has ever said to me." Calla grinned. "Do you play cards?"

"Badly."

"Perfect. Sit. I'll lose slowly."

They played two hands of gin on the hospital tray table.

Yvette lost both, on purpose, and then won one by accident, and Calla pointed at her and said she was a hustler.

It was the first time anyone had laughed in Yvette's company since the study.

The door opened at seven.

Dorothea Stoughton came in wearing a cream coat, holding a cut-glass vase of white roses in both hands.

"Calla, my darling, you look wonderful." She set the vase down and kissed the girl's forehead. Then she turned. "And you must be the young woman everyone is talking about."

Yvette stood. "Yvette Hutchinson, ma'am."

"Dorothea." The old woman took Yvette's hand in both of hers. "The nurses say you sat with her all night."

"I was mopping."

"You were kind. That is rarer." Dorothea's thumb rested on the inside of Yvette's left wrist, a beat longer than it needed to, and then she let go. "Calla does not take to people. She has taken to you in a night."

"Grandmother," Calla said, "don't make it weird."

"I would never." Dorothea smiled. "But I do need someone at the house. A companion for Calla through her recovery. Room, board, and double what the hospital pays you."

Yvette looked at the old woman's pale blue eyes and could find nothing in them but warmth.

She also looked at the girl in the bed, who was holding her breath.

Then she thought of the study and the thirty days she had given a man who did not believe her.

She would need to be in his house for it.

"I would be glad to," Yvette said.

"Wonderful." Dorothea touched her arm. "Alaric will drive you. He is downstairs."

The hospital's front doors let out into a gray, wet morning.

A black car idled at the curb, and Alaric stood beside it in his dark coat, holding an umbrella that he did not open.

He watched her cross the pavement carrying a plastic bag with her uniform in it.

"You took the job," he said.

"You filed it."

He said nothing.

Yvette stopped in front of him. The rain had left drops across the shoulders of his coat, and his collar sat crooked on one side where the lining had folded under.

She lifted her hand to fix it.

"Don't touch me."

He said it quietly, and he stepped back so fast that the umbrella struck the car door.

Yvette let her hand fall to her side.

"Why?" she asked.

"It is a rule." His eyes went past her, to the hospital windows. "In my house you will be paid, fed and left alone. That is the arrangement."

"I did not agree to that."

"You did not have to."

He opened the passenger door of the car.

He held it open for her with one hand, and kept the other pressed flat against his side, the fingers curled into a fist.

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