He rubs a hand over his jaw, unhurried, a man settling into his favorite part of the day.
"You know I've got people on your mother's floor right now who won't sign off on half of what those doctors want to do to her. Won't authorize it. Won't release records. Funny how much power a man keeps even after his wife ODs.”
"What do you want, Frank?"
He grins wider. “I’m hurt, Lyddie. After seven years, you don’t even have the decency of asking your daddy how he’s holding up?”
“Don’t you dare call yourself that.” I grit my teeth. “You’re not my fucking dad.”
“Hmm.” He chuckles and licks his lips as he gives me another up and down with his eyes, pausing slowly to rest his gaze on my chest. “And ain’t that the fucking truth.”
I stay by the door where I can still see the hallway through the little window in it, and some part of me hates myself for needing that.
"So, you ask me what I want," he says. "Answer is simple. All of it. All you have to do is bring me something real."
"Meaning what, Frank?"
"About your husband." He doesn't blink. "About the family he runs with. You're in his house now, Lyddie. You hear things. You see things. A smart girl in your position hears plenty."
"Vague as hell for a cop building a case."
"I like to leave room for flexibility.” He spreads his hands, easy, like he's offering me a gift instead of a noose. "You bring me something I can use, I make calls. That's it. That's the whole deal."
"And if I don't have anything?”
“I’m sure you’ll find something." He shrugs, like he's asked me to run an errand instead of hand over my husband's neck. “You’re a smart girl, and he looks so damn smitten with you that all you have to do is bat those pretty long lashes and he’ll tell you anything you want. You're not gonna sit around empty-handed forever."
"I'm not spying on my own husband for you, Frank."
"Then I guess you're not too worried about your mother."
He says it light, almost gentle, and that's the part that scares me most, how easy the cruelty sits on him, how quiet it stays even when it cuts.
I clench my jaws.
"You want to know what happens to a woman like her, Lyddie, once the machines come off and she's still not all the way back?" He leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Weak, confused, barely even fucking conscious.”
Then, the false warmth drops out of his voice all at once.
“But those holes of hers will still be fucking wet and warm.”
My stomach folds in on itself.
"I've got friends who’d been paying her visits for years," he says. "Good men. They'll come sit with her. Keep her company. Keep her hands full, so to speak.” He lets the word sit there, ugly and slow. "You remember how that worked before, don't you?"
I don't say anything. There isn't anything to say that he can't twist into leverage.
"So." He sits back, satisfied, like he's already won, because he has. "You bring me my something real. I agree to signing her off to you. Or." He shrugs, easy again, back to bravado. "My friends keep her nice and busy, just like old times."
I want to be sick right there on the linoleum. "You’re an unbelievable piece of shit.”
He watches me want it, and something in his face settles, loosens, the tight coiled thing behind his eyes going slack now that the trap's already sprung and he doesn't need to push anymore today.
"Go on back to your husband," he says, almost kind now, almost bored. "Think it over. Not like she's going anywhere."
I leave without another word because if I open my mouth again I'm going to say something that gets my mother hurt worse than she already is.
Nico's waiting exactlywhere I left him, arms crossed, jaw tight enough to crack a walnut. For one second I think he's going to ask what happened in that room, and I don't know what I'll say if he does.
