Riot novel · Chapter 4 of 24
Chapter 4: The Result
The result came on Friday, four days after the blood draw, and Rhys brought it to my kitchen himself.
He knocked at eight in the morning with a sealed envelope in one hand.
Art waited in the car downstairs, and a lawyer in a gray suit waited behind Art.
Bex let him in and sat down across from him at our two-person table with her arms crossed.
"I'm staying," she said.
"I expected that," Rhys said.
I stood at the counter with my back against the cabinet, because it was the only wall in the room that held me up.
He slit the envelope with his thumb.
He read the page once, and I watched his face.
It did not move.
He read it a second time.
Then he sat down and set the page on the table with both hands flat on either side of it.
"Ninety-nine point nine nine percent," he said.
"I told you."
"You told me."
He sounded tired, not angry.
He did not look at me for a full minute, and neither of us filled it.
Bex slid the page toward herself, read it, and slid it back.
"So you owe her something," Bex said.
"I do."
He took a checkbook from his coat and wrote a number.
He tore the check out and set it on the table, and then he pushed it toward me with two fingers.
It had a lot of zeroes on it.
I did not pick it up.
"That covers the doctor, the hospital, a place for you to live, and whatever you need for the next three years," he said. "Nobody will ever say you got nothing from me."
"I said I wanted none of it."
"I know what you said."
"Then why did you write it?"
"Because I don't know how else to do this," he said, and for a second he sounded his real age.
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