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On top of that, I worry about Sienna at home alone, getting ready in our empty apartment before she leaves for school. This is the first morning I haven’t been at home to see her off, and it makes me sick to my stomach, though I reminded her at least a dozen times to text when she left the apartment and again when she got to school.
I don’t even like the idea of her being twenty feet away in her bedroom anymore.
The first day she went back to school after what happened with Luke, I wanted to go with her to make sure she got there safely. I knew it wasn’t healthy to project my own fears onto her, but the world is a dangerous place, and despite the number of weeks that have passed, I still can’t get over the image of her covered in someone else’s blood or of Luke, standing behind her in the dark, empty house, holding a gun to her head.
I arrive at the hospital and head in, leery as I wait for the elevator to come, my stomach in knots. The state board of nursing went easy on me for what happened to Caitlin. It helped that I confessed, that I owned up to giving her someone else’s insulin by mistake and that I have almost twenty years’ experience without a blot on my resume. There have never been any other incidents like this at work. Now I’m under probation, I’m being monitored by the hospital and by the board, but I’m allowed to work. It doesn’t always happen like this. I could just have easily lost my license, but the truth is that the more severe the punishment handed down, the less nurses will be willing to report their mistakes, which makes patients less safe. There will be more cover-ups and more lies, though I didn’t, of course, give Caitlin someone’s insulin by mistake, but no one knows that but me.
I enter the unit. Despite killing a patient, I’m not some curiosity like I thought I’d be. Instead, Luke is, and any fears I had at coming back are instantly soothed when people come rushing up to me, saying, “Oh God, Meghan. I heard what happened,” and they’re not talking about how I killed a patient, but how Luke kidnapped Sienna and how my daughter and I watched him get shot by the police and die.
“Are you okay?” Bridget asks in the break room and I nod and say yes, though I’m not, not yet, and I don’t know that I will ever be entirely okay, but I’m trying. It gets easier every day.
Another nurse wraps her arms around me and says, “I missed you. I’m glad you’re back.”
“I can’t believe it was Luke all along.”
“What kind of person does something like that?”
It’s a good day. I’m happy to be back. I leave, lighter and smiling, and then later that night, after I’m home, Ben comes for Sienna, who’s in her room packing her bag for the weekend, and this time, he’s patient with her. He doesn’t get upset that he has to wait, but he stands instead in my living room, drinking a beer, asking about my day.
“I have something for you,” he says, after I’ve finished telling him about work.
“For me? You didn’t have to do that,” I say, thinking stupidly than Ben has bought something for me and feeling a spark of guilt that I don’t have anything for him in return, but also worried that he didn’t get the message about us not getting back together when I told him in the hospital, and still thinks it’s possible. How many times, I wonder, will I have to tell him no?
He sets his beer on the coffee table. “Close your eyes and hold out your hand.”
“Ben,” I protest, feeling silly.
“Just do it. Please, before Sienna comes out,” he says gently, and I do. My eyes sink slowly closed and I hold out a hand, palm facing up, feeling Ben’s warm hand clutch me by the fingers, holding on a minute too long before he places whatever he has for me on the palm of my hand.
The thing is practically weightless. I almost don’t know it’s there until Ben softly says, “Okay. You can open your eyes.”
I do. I open my eyes to find Ben watching me, a sparkle to his own eye, a smile playing on the edges of his lips. I smile back out of instinct, because his own smile is contagious.
But when I look down at the thing on my hand, my smile fades.
My missing engagement ring.
“Where did you...how did you...?” I ask, fighting for words, never finding them.
“It was in my condo,” he says. “I can’t explain it. Maybe Sienna took it and left it by mistake? I don’t know.”
I look up. Our eyes meet and I try in vain to read his, wondering if he’s telling the truth or if he knows more than he’s letting on.
“Yeah maybe,” I say but of course it didn’t happen that way. Sienna didn’t take the ring. Caitlin did. She took my rings from me that day she left, the day she told Sienna that she wasn’t Ben’s, but what happened after that is a mystery because, in theory, Ben and Caitlin had broken up by then. How did the ring come to be in his apartment if their relationship was through? Did she go back that same day to tell him the truth about me? Did she break into his condo to leave the ring?
Or was their relationship not through?
What if Ben only said it was to throw me off?
“I thought you’d want it back,” he says.
“Yes, of course. I do. I didn’t... I didn’t even know it was gone. I thought it was in my jewelry box.”
He shrugs. “Well,” he says, “it’s back where it belongs, and that’s all that matters.”
He leans in to kiss me chastely on the cheek. He pulls back, holding my eye too long so that my breath catches, heat filling my face, before Sienna’s bedroom door opens and she appears all of a sudden behind us.
“You ready?” Ben asks, releasing and looking past me, and she says she is.
As Ben turns to walk away from me, to leave the apartment with Sienna, I realize that I may never know how much he knows.
He might have something on me forever. I might not have gotten away with it after all.
