I Died In His Sick Game novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Not Her

Eli looked at the TV.

Then he looked at me.

"That's you," he said. "That's the missing wife."

"That's my husband."

On the screen, a reporter shouted a question about the island.

Bradley held up a hand and walked away from the podium with Kendra's arm through his.

Eli switched it off.

He sat back down slowly.

"Okay. We have to call somebody. The cops. Him. Somebody has to know you're alive."

"No."

"Abby, he's out there telling the whole state you're dead."

"He put me there."

I made myself say it plain, because I didn't have the breath for anything else.

"I caught him with her. That woman behind him. My best friend."

Eli didn't say anything.

"He left us there for a year. To teach me a lesson. She was three."

The machine beside the bed beeped in the quiet.

"Okay," Eli said at last.

He took out his phone.

I grabbed his wrist with what was left of my grip. "Not him."

"Not him," he agreed. "I'm calling my sister. She's worse than the cops."

Nan Sayward arrived the next morning with a cooler on wheels.

She was a big, weathered woman with a gray-streaked braid down her back and white rubber boots that squeaked on the hospital floor.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she looked at her brother.

"She woke up yesterday and you're telling me now?"

"I told you last night."

"You told me you had a situation." She turned to me. "He calls everything a situation. His divorce was a situation. Honey, are you hungry?"

I was always hungry.

I didn't know how to say that.

Nan opened the cooler.

There was conch chowder in a thermos and soft rolls and a container of key lime pie.

"Small bites," she said. "Your stomach's going to be mad at you. Let it be mad."

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