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“I…I had worked out it was someone at the school,” I say. “I think?”

“This is the first I’m hearing of that.”

“I remember the conclusion but I don’t remember the name. If I had one.”

I wrack my brain trying to bring up a name but nothing comes up. I just knew that it had to be someone at the school because the bodies came in and didn’t go back out, so someone at the school had to be behind it. The question is, who and when did this happen?

“If you had one, you didn’t tell me,” she says.

“Then I didn’t have one yet. Or I had one and I was holding on to it…but again, I don’t remember.”

She looks at my throat again, and at my shoulder, and I register for the first time that I’m not wearing a shirt, that I’m bare to the waist under the sheet, and that the sheet below the hollow of my throat is spotted dark where something has bled through from the back.

“You’re still bleeding,” she notes.

“I can tell. Is this the part where you tell me how I was murdered?”

She lets out a shaky breath. “I found you face down, your back was obliterated by stab wounds and your throat was slashed open.”

“Fuck.” Someone really hated me, or at least really wanted me dead.

A sick feeling prickles through me. It’s not natural for someone to have gone through that and come back from it.

“But the blood is from your back more than your throat. Lean forward. Carefully. I need to see.”

I lean. The movement pulls something between my shoulder blades and I hiss. She gets up and goes over to the washbasin, I hear the sound of water sloshing around, then she comes back with a wet cloth.

“How many times was I stabbed?”

“Oh, I counted five wounds.”

“Fuck,” I swear again. “Someone stabbed me in the back five times? And that wasn’t enough, they had to slit my throat?”

“Guess they wanted to be thorough.”

I reach up to feel my throat but she bats my hand away.

“Don’t touch it. They’re healing but they aren’t done yet and they’ll bleed if you move hard and they’ll scar worse if we don’t do this now.”

“We?”

“Me, then.”

“No, no. We is fine. We’re in this together now.”

“For better or for worse,” she says and despite the shock I’m in, the fact that I am what one might call the recently deceased, there’s an undercurrent to her voice that makes me wary. As if…as if I’d done something to wrong her, like she’s taking care of me begrudgingly. Like she had a choice to bring me back to life or not and it was one she made with reluctance.

I suppose I can’t blame her. I have no idea how much this is costing her and I’m terribly certain that I’m not worth it.

“This is going to be cold,” she says as she handles the washcloth. She’s right. I gasp, trying to move out of the way, but the movement only brings me more pain.

The cloth moves again, to my shoulder blade, down the spine to my lower back. She works in silence for a while and I practically fall asleep, my eyes fluttering closed. Despite everything, there’s something soothing about being doted on like this.

Then there’s the sound of a jar being opened, and a smell I don’t recognize at first. Something green, herbal and resinous. I turn my head a quarter to look. She has a small jar in her lap and she’s digging her fingers into it, and what comes out on her fingers is thick and shiny, the color of fresh young olives.

“What is that?”

“A healing balm. It’ll keep the wounds clean and help them close without pulling.”