Thrown Out at Midnight, I Saved a General by Dawn novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Thirty Days

Ansel offers a thirty-day contract and a room in his guarded house while Lenore smears her online and a police summons arrives.

By noon I was in the back of a black SUV, in a clean borrowed sweatshirt, eating the best scrambled eggs of my life out of a foam box.

The general sat across from me with his cane between his knees, glaring at it.

Two more SUVs drove ahead of us and one behind.

"You discharged yourself against medical advice," I said.

"I'm the medical advice now," Ansel Rourke said. "You're my doctor."

"I have a house with its own gate and a guest wing nobody's used in years. Come and finish what you started."

"I don't have a license in my pocket. I don't have a pocket."

"I have lawyers. Three of them."

"I have no money and no home."

"Then we'll write it down."

He took a folded sheet from the aide in the front seat and slid it across the seat.

It was one page, typed.

I read it twice.

Thirty days of treatment at his residence, and a salary that made me stop reading for a second.

It gave me a room with a lock on the inside.

It put his legal team on Carver Memorial and the state board.

"The lock is a courtesy," he said. "You can check it yourself."

"I want three terms added."

"Go on."

"One. I touch you for treatment only. Hands, arms, back, whatever I need to examine. Nothing else."

The aide in the front seat very carefully looked out the windshield.

"Agreed," Ansel said. "Two?"

"Nobody else gives you a drug or touches your chart. Not a nurse, not a specialist, not you."

"Agreed."

"Three. I can leave any day I want, and you don't stop me."

He looked at me for a while.

Up close his eyes were gray and bloodshot.

"You think I'd keep you?"

"I think I've been thrown out of one house already today. I want the door."

"You'll have the door," he said, and held out a pen with his left hand.

His fingers shook, and he held on anyway.

I signed my name under his, and my hand wasn't steady either.

The house stood behind two gates and a long drive lined with bare oaks.

It was brick, with a slate roof, and the shutters had not been painted in years.

A woman in a gray cardigan met us at the door and took my coat without a word.

My room was upstairs at the end of a hall, with a bed that had a real quilt on it and a window over the orchard.

I locked the door and checked it, and then I sat on the quilt and put my face in my hands.

I didn't cry.

I only sat there until my body understood that nothing was going to hit it for the next minute.

A knock came at the door.

It was the aide, holding a phone in a black case.

"The general's compliments," he said. "This one's clean. Nothing on it is tied to your old number or your family's plan."

"Thank you."

"Ma'am, you should look at your messages. Before dinner. It's not good."

I took the phone and opened the first link he had saved for me.

It was a video, posted at 7:02 that morning by an account called Lenore's Table.

It was my stepmother's kitchen, and it was me.

It had been cut down to a few seconds.

Lenore's voice came first.

"Say it clearly, Tessa."

Then it cut to my face, with my mouth closed and my eyes on the floor.

Then it cut to the white car on the lawn, and to my father's hand on my shoulder.

Then came a title card in pink script.

Pray for our family.

The caption said their eldest daughter had hit a neighbor's mailbox while impaired, fled and refused all help.

It said they were heartbroken, and that the police had been called.

It had four thousand shares already.

The comments said what comments say.

Somebody had written, I knew her at Carver, she always seemed off.

Somebody else had put my full name and the name of my hospital in a reply, with a skull.

I read forty of them.

I did not stop until the aide gently took the phone out of my hand.

"There's a second thing," he said.

"Of course there is."

"A county detective is at the gate. She has a summons."

"For what?"

"Hit and run, driving under the influence, leaving the scene. You're expected at the sheriff's station Monday at nine."

I laughed once, and it hurt.

"They didn't wait a day."

"No, ma'am."

"They'd have me booked before I could sit down."

Someone knocked again, harder, and the door opened without waiting.

Ansel stood in the hall.

He was gripping the doorframe with one hand and the cane with the other.

He had just climbed a flight of stairs on legs that had been failing for a year.

He had read the summons.

"Don't," I said. "Don't fix this for me. I'm not going to hide in your house while your lawyers make it go away."

"I wasn't going to suggest that."

"Then what?"

"Monday morning," Ansel said, "you and I walk into that station through the front door."

"In daylight, with everything you've got."

I looked at his white knuckles on the doorframe.

"You can barely walk."

"Then you'd better get me better by Monday, Doctor."

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