That just caused a burst of pain to hit me and caused nausea to well.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked the moment that the nausea cleared.
Belle looked at me.
“Well,” she hesitated. “I was eating tacos when I got a call from EMS that you’d been in an accident. When I got here, you were in a medically induced coma due to possible brain damage. There was a court order to wake you up, apparently, because there’s cause to believe that the panel van carrying those kids was one of about five other vans just like it. I decided that you shouldn’t be left alone, so I came in here, and then all these police officers started showing up. But based on your activities from the other night, I knew that you couldn’t have been involved in the stuff that they said you were. So I… lied.”
I blinked owlishly at her words.
“What day is it?” I asked.
“Tuesday,” she answered immediately.
“And we just were at the bar on Friday night, right? The night you ate those chicken wings?” I asked, remembering how she looked eating those chicken wings.
Somewhere during the course of the conversation, the last few days had caught up with me, and I now remembered everything up until today. I couldn’t tell you a single thing that had happened until now.
“Yes,” she confirmed.
“Okay.” I cleared my throat. “And what about the fiancé thing?”
She smiled, presenting me with brilliant white teeth.
“That was all me.” She paused. “I didn’t like that you were in here by yourself. While I eavesdropped in the emergency room, I found that you were just left there to stay, and I knew that I wouldn’t like waking up with police officers in my room asking me questions. Which I knew you wouldn’t like, either. So I had to lie to get to stay with you.”
I smiled softly at her.
My face was broken.
That had to be why I was smiling so much.
Her phone rang seconds later, and I looked at it pointedly.
“I don’t know who it is,” she said by way of explanation.
I jerked my chin. “Answer it.”
I had a feeling that I knew who it was.
“I don’t…” She hesitated.
“Just answer it,” I repeated. “It might be for me.”
She did then, placing it to her ear and saying a hesitant, “Hello?”
She frowned hard, and her beautiful scowl had me smiling wide.
For some reason, I wasn’t getting upset over my show of emotion.
From a young age, I was taught over and over again that showing any emotion at all was a very bad thing.
If my stepfather didn’t know he was affecting me, he didn’t get to see the reaction he was getting out of me, which then in turn meant that he couldn’t torture me even further.
It was a game that I played with myself.
One that was sometimes a hard game to deal with when I got my face bashed in for my lack of reaction.
Belle sighed, breaking me out of the nightmare that was my formative years, as she pulled the phone away from her face and placed it on a mound of pillows. I looked down to see Lynn’s face staring back at me.