From Substitute Wife to the CEO's Obsession novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Her Voice
Reading to Renata, Lorena makes her sister's fingers move when Ignacio's voice could not; Consuelo sends her out of the room, and in the corridor Lorena hears that the thirty days are written and that Ignacio insisted on them.
Renata's room on the neurology floor smelled of soap and the lilies Consuelo had sent on Monday.
A year of machines had left it quiet.
Renata lay with her dark hair braided over one shoulder, thinner than Lorena had ever seen her.
Lorena sat in the chair by the bed with a battered paperback in her lap.
It was Renata's favorite book, about two sisters who ran a ranch together.
Ignacio stood by the window with his hands in his pockets.
"The neurologist says to read something she knows," he said. "I tried the business news yesterday. Nothing."
"It's a long way from the business news to this," Lorena said.
"Read."
She opened to the first page.
"Chapter one," she read. "The rain came early that year, and my sister was the first to hear it on the roof."
Her voice cracked on the word sister.
She cleared her throat and went on.
She read for ten minutes.
Renata did not stir.
On the second page Lorena's voice settled, and her fingers began to turn the pages without her thinking about it.
Then the doctor, standing at the foot of the bed with a tablet, said, "Stop a moment."
Lorena stopped.
"Her right hand," the doctor said. "Look."
Renata's fingers lay on the white blanket.
They curled slowly inward and then slowly out.
Ignacio crossed the room in three steps.
He did not touch his fiancée's hand.
He stood over it with his arms stiff at his sides.
"Again," he said, and his voice was not steady. "Read again, Lorena."
She read the same line.
The fingers moved again.
"She responds to you," the doctor said. "Not to him. Yesterday there was nothing when he spoke."
"Why me?" Lorena asked.
"You're her sister. You sound like her." The doctor smiled. "Come every morning, if you can."
Lorena looked at Ignacio.
He had turned toward the window again, and she saw his shoulders drop.
She told herself he was relieved to be hopeful.
The door opened.
Consuelo came in with her bag on her arm and her pearls on her collar, and she took in the room at one look.
"Ignacio, you should have called me. Renata moved?"
"For Lorena," Ignacio said.
"For her voice," the doctor corrected. "It's a good sign."
Consuelo went to the bed and laid a hand on Renata's forehead.
"My poor girl," she said. "Lorena, dear, you've been here forty minutes. You'll tire her."
"The doctor asked me to come every morning."
"Of course. Every morning, in a few weeks. Today the family should have a moment."
She did not look at Lorena as she said it.
Lorena was Renata's sister, and her voice was the one Renata answered.
She looked at Ignacio and waited.
He stood very still and looked at his mother.
He said nothing.
Lorena closed the book and put it on the bedside table, spine out, so Renata could find it.
"I'll be outside," she said.
In the corridor a nurse was refilling a cart of linens.
The door of the room did not quite shut behind her, and Consuelo's voice came through it, low and carrying.
"Don't give her ideas," Consuelo said to someone. "A year was a favor. Thirty days after Renata wakes and the girl is gone. It's written."
"Mamá," Ignacio said, very quietly.
"It's in the contract. You insisted."
Lorena stood in the corridor with her back against the cold wall.
The nurse had stopped folding towels.
Lorena took her bag from her shoulder and held it in both hands.
She had known all of it.
She had read the line in blue ink a hundred times.
But she had not known he had insisted.
Not until she heard it from his mother's mouth, in a room where she could not go.
She raised her chin and walked past the nurse's cart toward the elevator.
At the end of the hall she turned around.
Ignacio had come out of the room.
He stood by the door looking down the corridor at her, and for a moment she thought he meant to follow.
His mother's voice called him from inside.
He turned and went back in.
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