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Chapter Thirty-Five
Grace
My mother-in-law once said to me, “Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.”Thinking about it now, that was advice I should have heeded.It’s hard to know what you don’t know, and I suppose we all have our blind spots.
I keep replaying the scene over and over in horrific detail.This is not surprising.There’s not much else to do when you're in solitary.
In my mind, I keep seeing Elizabeth fire that gun.I see her pull the trigger.I see her brains coat the walls, me, the floor, everything.With so much time on my hands, I try to piece everything together.I try to work out exactly where and how everything went wrong.
What made her think she had no choice but to take her own life?Why did she shoot Marlon and Dr.Branson?Why had she pulled the trigger?Why hadn’t she de-escalated the situation?Why couldn’t she just put down the bag and go back to our room?
My guess?I think she’d made her decision.She was getting out.There was no other option.She’d burned the boats, so to speak.
She can’t tell me this, of course.Not anymore.But I was there.I saw the look on her face.
They put Bradley on leave following the shooting, but to my surprise, and maybe even his, he’s back on the job within a week, and he visits me in solitary.
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” I say to him when he delivers my lunch tray.He looks at me indignantly, like half of him feels guilt that he’s hard at work but the other half of him can’t be bothered.
“What were you doing here?”I ask again when he brings my dinner.“You were supposed to set the fire and leave.”
“You worry about yourself,” he says.
“You were supposed to wait in the car.But you weren’t.Why?”
I ask him this, though I’m not expecting much in the way of an answer.Ironically, I seem to be the only one with questions.No one asks what he was doing, or why he was here, when he was supposed to be off duty.Me, I know the truth, and I think Elizabeth knew too.
He never saw Elizabeth and me getting out of here.
She was right.
He had set her up.
“You wanted Dr.Branson out of the picture,” I say.“You put that gun in her hands.”
“You’re crazy,” he tells me, spitting in my food.If it’s a message, it’s a childish one.But I wouldn’t put it past him to do worse—possibly whatever it takes to shut me up.How much rope am I going to give him?I don’t know.Grief does strange things to people.
I’ve just showed the enemy where to aim.
“Maybe I am crazy,” I say.“But you got played.”
I refuse to believe Elizabeth hadn’t known what she was doing.Maybe not completely, but she had to know what would happen, pitting the two men against one another, both of them vying for her attention.
What she hadn’t counted on was Bradley betraying her; him going behind her back by telling Dr.Branson what she had planned.She hadn’t realized it was a setup from the get go.When you have a good thing going, you want to keep that good thing.You don’t let it walk right out the door, at least not without a fight.
“Did you know she was going to kill herself?”I ask when my next meal comes.“I’m thinking not.I bet that tiny little brain of yours couldn’t connect the dots.”
“Of course I didn’t know,” he says bitterly.“None of us did.”
