Chương 2
Isabella placed the pill in Dante’s palm.
He studied it.
Small. White. Unmarked.
He had swallowed one like it almost every night.
Sometimes two, depending on the week.
“What is it?”
“You know what it is.”
“I know what I was told it is.”
Her face tightened.
“It’s your nighttime medication.”
“That answer’s insulting.”
“Elena,” Isabella said, “would you please explain to my husband that a reflex doesn’t mean he can walk?”
Elena did not answer immediately.
Dante caught that too.
The delay.
The choice.
Finally she said, “A reflex alone wouldn’t.”
Isabella’s shoulders lowered slightly.
Then Elena continued.
“He also produced voluntary toe movement.”
Silence settled over the room.
Isabella looked at Dante’s feet.
Dante watched her looking.
She recovered.
Not perfectly.
But well.
“Then that’s wonderful.”
The sentence sounded right.
The voice did not.
Dante rolled the pill between his thumb and forefinger.
“You don’t look happy.”
“I’m shocked.”
“So is she.”
He tipped his chin toward Elena.
“She looks like a doctor who found something she doesn’t understand. You look like somebody who found something she hoped stayed buried.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Turn one strange examination into a conspiracy because you’re frightened.”
A corner of Dante’s mouth moved.
“Frightened.”
“Yes.”
She crossed the room and placed the water on the table. The glass clicked against stone.
“You have been through hell. If there’s improvement, then we get it confirmed. We call Dr. Hale in the morning. We schedule new imaging, new nerve studies, whatever Elena thinks is appropriate.”
Elena’s gaze lifted at the name.
Dante noticed.
“You know Hale?”
“I know of him.”
“Good things?”
“That isn’t the question I’d be asking right now.”
Isabella turned toward her.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I want to know exactly what he has been prescribing.”
“It’s in the chart.”
“No,” Elena said. “Some of it is in the chart.”
That landed.
Dante unfolded his fingers.
The white pill sat in the center of his tattooed palm.
“What’s missing?”
Elena took the medication list and pointed to an entry.
“This says your evening regimen was changed fourteen months ago because of increased spasticity.”
Dante nodded once.
“I remember.”
“Do you?”
His eyes lifted.
She was not challenging him.
She was asking literally.
He searched for the memory.
Fourteen months ago.
There had been a week of headaches. A television left on all night. Isabella calling his office to cancel something. A nurse changing bedsheets while he slept.
“I remember being tired.”
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
He frowned.
Elena looked back at the chart.
“You were supposedly having increased spasms severe enough to justify an additional muscle relaxant. Do you remember the spasms?”
Dante stared at her.
No.
He remembered being told about them.
That was different.
Isabella folded her arms.
“He was having them at night.”
“Did you witness them?” Elena asked.
“Yes.”
“Who else?”
“His night nurse.”
“Which one?”
“Carla. Maybe Jennifer too. I don’t remember.”
Dante kept staring at the pill.
His throat had become dry.
“How many medication changes have there been?”
Elena turned pages.
“According to this?”
“According to anything.”
“I can’t answer that without records.”
Isabella gave a short, frustrated breath.
“This is becoming ridiculous.”
Dante looked up.
She stopped speaking.
He had not raised his voice.
That was why she stopped.
Before the accident, people mistook his anger for volume. Afterward, he had learned the opposite. The quieter he became, the more carefully other people listened.
“Marcus.”
“Yes.”
“Get a clean evidence bag.”
Isabella gave a disbelieving laugh.
“Evidence?”
Marcus walked toward the kitchen.
“Dante.”
He looked at her.
“You are not turning our home into a crime scene because your foot twitched.”
“It moved when I told it to.”
“You heard Dr. Hayes. That doesn’t mean—”
“I heard her.”
“She also said she doesn’t know what it means.”
“That’s why the pill goes to a lab.”
For the first time, Isabella looked genuinely afraid.
It lasted less than a second.
But fear had lived beside Dante for long enough that he recognized it in others.
She stepped toward him.
“Do you have any idea what stopping your medication suddenly could do?”
Elena answered before Dante could.
“She’s right about that.”
Dante turned.
Elena came closer.
“If you’ve been taking a central muscle relaxant or sedative regularly, we do not abruptly discontinue anything until we know exactly what you’ve been taking. Withdrawal can be dangerous.”
He gave a humorless smile.
“So I keep swallowing mystery pills.”
“No.”
“Then give me another option.”
“We go to a hospital.”
Isabella shook her head.
“At midnight?”
“Yes.”
“He has a private medical team.”
“That private medical team is part of what I need to verify.”
“You have known him for two weeks.”
“And his toes moved when he asked them to.”
The room went quiet again.
Marcus returned with a small plastic evidence pouch from the security cabinet.
Dante dropped the pill inside.
Marcus sealed it.
Isabella stared at the bag.
Dante stared at Isabella.
That evening had begun with three hundred donors drinking champagne beneath chandeliers in a hotel ballroom two floors below. Isabella had spent most of dinner smiling for photographs beside him, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. She had told a story about the first apartment they shared in Queens, how the radiator clanged so loudly they slept in coats one winter because they were afraid to complain to the landlord.
People had laughed.
Dante had laughed too.
He had forgotten that detail.
Now he remembered Isabella standing in that apartment twelve years earlier, hair tied up with a pencil, holding a wrench she did not know how to use.
She had been twenty-three.
He had been twenty-eight and already working fourteen-hour days because he was convinced anyone who slept more than six hours had accepted being average.
That girl had once thrown a mug at him because he missed her father’s birthday.
May you like
This woman held his medication every night.
He could not make the two people fit together.
