The End of Us novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Hands Off

We found Ginny at Hollow Bend, twenty feet from the wreck, sitting in the dead leaves with her coat over her knees.

Her left arm was bent wrong, and there was a cut over her eyebrow.

"A truck came up behind me with its lights off," she said through her teeth. "It hit me twice. I got out before it hit me the third time."

"Did you see the driver?"

"No. Four men. They wore masks." She looked at Keith. "They left a note on the dashboard."

Keith held it up in his flashlight beam.

Mind your business, nurse.

I wanted to be sick.

Keith's medic set her arm in the back of a Stroud truck, and Ginny swore at him the whole time, and I held her good hand.

By midnight she lay in the Stroud infirmary with a cast, a sedative, and two guards on her door.

I walked back to the cabin with Keith because I could not think of anywhere else to go.

The porch light was on.

I stood in the kitchen, and I found that I could not make my hands stop shaking.

"She's all right," Keith said from the doorway. "It's a clean break."

"They did that because of me."

"They did that because Maud is afraid of what a nurse knows."

"They could have killed her."

"They didn't."

"That isn't good enough," I said, and my voice broke.

He crossed the room.

I had a scrape on my palm from the gravel, and he took my hand and turned it over under the kitchen light.

He ran water over it, and he dabbed it dry with a clean cloth, and he did not say a word.

His hands were gentle, and his breathing was not.

I looked up.

He was looking at my mouth.

"Rule," he said, very low. "You said I don't touch you unless the bond is making you sick."

"I'm sick."

"Are you?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

I took his hand off my palm, and I pressed it flat against my chest, over my heart.

"There."

Something in his face gave way.

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