I Died In His Sick Game novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Hand

"Get her some water," Bradley snapped at the nearest nurse. "She's fainted."

He carried Kendra to the armchair and knelt beside it, patting her cheek.

His mother fanned her with the picture book.

Nobody fanned my daughter.

I sat down on the edge of the bed with Tilly in my lap, because my knees were about to go.

She had her fist knotted in the sweatshirt. She wasn't letting go.

The older of the two nurses came over with a cup of juice.

She held it out to Tilly, and Tilly drank it in big, desperate swallows.

"Slow, baby," I said. "There's more. There's always more now."

The nurse watched her drink.

Then she looked at my arm again.

"Ma'am," she said quietly. "What happened to your arm?"

Everybody in the room heard her.

I pushed the sleeve all the way up to my elbow.

The cuts ran in short pale rows from my wrist halfway up my forearm. Some were healed white. Some were still pink.

"There was a week in May when it didn't rain," I said. "The water jugs were empty. The lake was salt."

I said it to the nurse. Not to him.

"I cut my arm with a shell, and she drank."

The younger nurse put her hand over her mouth.

Tilly took her face out of the sweatshirt.

"Mommy's arm," she told the nurse, very seriously. "It tasted like pennies."

The older nurse knelt down so she was level with my daughter.

"Did Mommy give you food, sweetheart?"

"Berries," Tilly said. "And crabs. And the green leaves. She gave me all the berries. She ate the leaves."

The nurse stood up.

She took a pen out of her pocket and wrote something on her clipboard, and kept writing.

"She's lying," Bradley said.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Died In His Sick Game from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.