Ashes Learned Human Names novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Bead on the Chain

Lucia turned the phone face down on her knee in the dark car.

"Again," she said. "Why does he say again?"

Rafael's jaw worked.

"He's trying to rattle me," he said. "He does it when he thinks he's losing."

"Rattle you about what?"

"I proposed to a girl last year," Rafael said. "It ended badly. He never lets me forget it."

"Which girl?"

"Nobody you know."

He said it quickly, with his eyes on the windshield.

Lucia looked at the side of his face for a long time.

Rafael had never proposed to anyone, not in her first life, and she would have known.

Elvira would have told her within a week.

"Okay," she said.

He turned toward her.

"Okay?"

"Okay," she said again, and let him drive.

She had learned this from Paulina.

You let the liar finish, and you remember every word.

The surgery was on Friday.

The doctor explained it with a diagram, in a cheerful voice that did not help.

"We take healthy skin from your thigh and lay it over the worst of the burn," he said. "It will take three or four rounds over several months. The scarring will fade, but it won't disappear."

"Understood," Lucia said.

"Most patients want to hear it will disappear."

"I'd rather hear the truth," she said, and signed the paper with her right hand.

Marta cried in the corridor while the orderlies wheeled Lucia away.

Rafael walked beside the bed as far as the double doors, and the orderly had to tell him twice to stop.

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