Page 102 of The Dearly Departed

I shook my head. "No."

"But—"

“I said, no," I interrupted harshly, my jaw clenched.

She looked rejected and wounded, like a child who’d just been scolded.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just need you to understand that I—”

“No, I do understand,” she replied, letting the topic rest.

But she was hurt, even as she refocused her attention on the wound, tearing the pant leg further toward my thigh until my entire calf and knee were exposed.

She thinks I don’t trust her … because I don’t.

But I want to.

"It's a pretty deep cut," she assessed as she retrieved something from beneath the couch. “You’re going to need stitches.”

“I figured,” I muttered as I lifted my head to find a first aid kit opened on the floor beside her. Then I chuckled as she pulled out a pair of latex gloves. “You’ve done this before.”

"Well, when you live in this family, you have to be prepared. Why do you think I went to nursing school?"

I furrowed my brow. “I didn’t know you were a nurse.”

“Only here,” she muttered, slipping her hands into the gloves and grabbing a bottle of what I assumed to be antiseptic. "This is going to hurt, by the way."

I winced as she poured the contents of the bottle onto the deep wound, my sharp inhale hissing through my clenched teeth.

"So, you became a nurse for Gerald?” I asked, diverting my attention to something else, something more pleasant.

Something like …

Her.

"Not for Gerald. For the Seints," she corrected me. "Everybody earns their keep in one way or another. And it’s always been like that, long before I came around.”

"You're only, what, twenty-five?"

Her lips curved into a flirtatious smile as she said, “Doctor, flattery isn’t going to make this sting any less.”

“I wasn’t—”

She interrupted with a gentle laugh as she dabbed at the cut with a cloth that was quickly being covered in my blood. "I’m actually thirty. But I was adopted by my mother when I was nine."

"You were adopted," I repeated, turning my head to stare across the room at the painting of the shoreline. "So, you were in the system?"

"Yep, ever since I was … two, I think. Maybe three. I can't remember."

"Me too," I replied softly, folding my hands over my stomach as my gaze lingered on that image of the sunset sinking beneath the water’s surface. "Well, I was four, but … same difference."

"Were you ever adopted?"

"No,” I answered flatly, before quickly correcting myself, “Well, not technically. My father … he took me in off the streets when I was sixteen."

"So, you were a runaway," she guessed, slowly wiping the blood away in gentle strokes of the cloth against my skin.

"I did what I had to do," I replied before swallowing down a slew of memories I’d rather not linger on.