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“What? I’m paying you a compliment. I mean, there’s cruel and then there’s Dante level of cruel,” she says with a wicked laugh.
“What the hell are you on about?”
“Kat,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “You’ve outdone yourself.”
“She’s breathing, isn’t she?” I snap. “No thanks to you.”
“Yeah, but come on. Depriving someone of any human interaction or any kind of mental stimulation at all is probably one of the cruelest things you can do to a person. Well played, brother.” She pats me on the back as she says it, but her voice is dripping with sarcasm.
“Are you suggesting she should be rewarded for trying to escape? For trying to take my child away from me before I even got a chance to know about it? I should let her walk around here like she used to?”
“Everything is so black and white with you. Everything you do is extreme. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can still punish her while making sure she doesn’t have a full-scale mental breakdown in the process,” she says before she starts to walk down the hallway.
“Joey,” I call after her.
She spins around, a smile on her face because she knows she just played me.
“She’ll be sleeping soon. Take her some magazines or books or something tomorrow morning.”
“Whatever you say, big brother.”
Chapter25
Kat
“Hey, Kat,” a soft voice says, and I figure I’m dreaming because nobody talks to me anymore. Hands are brushing my hair back from my face and there’s a damp cloth wiping over my jaw too. My eyelids flutter open.
“Joey?”
“You were sick,” she says, her face pulled into a frown.
“Yeah,” I say, my head throbbing as I shuffle into a sitting position. I remember now. It came on so suddenly and violently that I couldn’t even make it to the bathroom. And then I think I passed out.
“How long have you been sick like this?”
“A few days.”
“Are you keeping anything down?”
“No,” I say. I don’t even have the energy to shake my head.
“Is this normal in pregnancy?”
“No. I think it might be… I might have hyperemesis gravidarum. My mom had it with me.”
“What the hell is that?”
“A fancy way of saying extreme morning sickness.” I give a feeble laugh.
I’m pretty sure Joey isn’t really here and I’m hallucinating or something. I wonder why it’s her of all people I’m seeing though. I mean, I thought it would be my mom or my grandma.
My eyes fixate on her face as my brain wakes up a little more. Dream Joey has a huge purple bruise on her cheek.
She covers it with her hand when she sees me staring.
“I’m sorry he did that to you because of me,” I whisper, even though she’s not real.
“It wasn’t Dante,” she says as she places her hand on my forehead. “Kat I’m really worried about you.”
