Page 16 of What We Burn

I get the cleaning kit from the trunk. Rags, bleach, a bottle of saline for the wounds—don’t want our star witness dying of infection—and then I do what I do best.

I erase what we just did.

FIVE

SAGE

“Can you swallow for me?”

The nursing student has gentle hands, I’ll give her that.

She’s young—maybe a little older than me—with dark blonde hair she’s pulled into a braid. She’s tall and curvy, but strong. She lifted me up out of the wheelchair and into the shower seat without even groaning yesterday.

I like her. When she smiles, the little beauty spot on her right cheek sinks into a dimple. It’s cute.

She checks and double-checks my machines in a way that tells me she’s still new and determined to get everything right. Her name tag says ROSALINE, but she told me to call her Ro.

“Just a little one. I know it hurts.”

I try. It’s like swallowing a tennis ball wrapped in barbed wire. My face must show it because she winces in sympathy and makes a note on her clipboard.

“That’s actually better than yesterday,” she says. “Yesterday you couldn’t swallow at all.”

Great. Progress. Yesterday I was a zero and today I’m a one. At this rate I’ll be eating mush by Christmas.

“Your oxygen levels are good.” She removes the clip from my finger and hangs the blood pressure cuff back on its hook. “Swelling’s coming down. Voice is coming back. You’re doing really well, Sage.”

“Doesn’t feel like it,” I rasp.

“I know.” She makes a note on her clipboard, then glances up. “But I will say—I’ve never seen a patient with this many visitors. You’ve got a lot of people pulling for you.”

She’s not wrong. The last two days have been a revolving door. Amy came twice—the first time she cried so hard a nurse had to bring her tissues and a cup of water, the second time she brought supermarket flowers and talked for an hour straight about a reality show while I drifted in and out. Her voice was a warm, familiar hum that made the room feel less like a hospital and more like our apartment on a Sunday morning.

Jamie came. My boss at the diner told him I’d been in an accident and he showed up with a bouquet of sunflowers and a soft throw blanket because “hospital blankets are a crime against humanity.” He sat with me for twenty minutes, making small talk and trying not to directly address the dressing around my neck—which I was grateful for.

And of course, my guys have been here.

Knox has barely left. He sleeps in the chair, eats in the cafeteria, comes right back. Micah comes in the evenings and sits beside me. He doesn’t try to fill the silence, just holds my hand and lets me exist. Milo spent twenty minutes doing a one-man show of hospital observations until a nurse told him to keep his voice down. He whispered the rest of it, which was somehow funnier.

Eli stays in his corner. He’s there when I wake up. There when I fall asleep. He doesn’t come closer. I don’t ask him to. Don’t even speak to him.

Two detectives came yesterday. They stood at the foot of the bed with their notebooks and their soft, careful voices, and not once did either of them say the word attack.

They said incident. They said what happened to you. They said are you sure there isn’t anything you want to tell us, Sage, anything at all, in the voice you’d use on a horse that might bolt. And lying there with the gauze wound around my throat, I already knew what was written on the chart with my name on it. Knox had told me that morning, flat and low, the way he delivers things he thinks will hurt me: they’re calling it self-inflicted, Fury. We didn’t correct them.

Self-inflicted. A woman alone, a rope, a bad night. Tidy. Believable. The kind of thing that earns a pamphlet in your discharge folder and a follow-up call from a crisis line and then, mercifully, nothing. No case. No file that grows fat. No detective with a whiteboard asking the only two questions that actually matter.

Who. And why.

There was a moment—small, ugly, mine—where I hated that they’d decided it without me. That I’d been in a coma while authorities drew incorrect conclusions about the worst night of my life, and nobody close to me thought to wait and ask me which version I wanted to wear. Holden worked the scene. He looked at the lie that turns me into a woman who tried to die in the dark, and he let it stand, and I didn’t get a vote.

I should be furious.

But not at them.

The blood pressure cuff tightens around my arm like it’s double-checking I’m still here. Ro watches the monitor, nodding at the numbers, and scribbles on my chart.

I’ve followed the thread all the way to the end now, in the long beeping hours when there’s nothing to do but think, and it always goes the same way. An attack becomes a case. A case asks who. Who has no answer that doesn’t lead to why. And why is a party, and a beach, and what happened on the sand, and a man who’s never coming home in a grave nobody’s looking for. Pull the rope around my neck hard enough and it cinches around five others.