I hold onto the edge of the table because my legs have turned to jello. Graham’s blue eyes look almost black as he glares at me.
“You’re lying,” he says.
“What… what do you mean?” I plaster an innocent expression on my face. It’s hard to believe it looks even remotely realistic.
“You didn’t drink that water,” he hisses at me. “Yes, I did.”
“No, you didn’t. You poured the water into the plant. I saw you do it.”
Crap.
I think back to the conversation I had with Harry at the dog park. You have said those exact words to me multiple times now. You knew he was drugging you. You tried to avoid it. And the next day, nothing has changed. You’ve still lost your memory.
Is this what happened all those other nights? I tried to get rid of the tainted water and Graham caught me? And now what will he do?
“Why did you do that?” he presses me. “Why did you dump out your water?”
I tug on the sleeve of my sweater. “It… it looked cloudy.
I don’t know… like, maybe something was floating in it…”
He narrows his eyes. “Did somebody tell you I was putting something in your water?”
“No,” I say quickly. Maybe too quickly.
Graham is looking down at something. I follow his gaze and realize he’s staring at my arm. I was fiddling with the sleeve of my sweater, and I had inadvertently tugged it up
several inches. And now Graham can see the last several digits of a phone number.
Oh no.
He crosses the distance between us and seizes my left arm in his hand hard enough to leave behind bruises. He wrenches up my sleeve, revealing the digits Harry scribbled on my arm. Graham’s eyes widen behind his spectacles. “Really? Are you kidding me with this, Tess?”
I open my mouth to say something, but no words come out. I’m starting to see why Camila was only allowed to set the table with butter knives.
He releases my arm and glares at me. “Whose number is that? Who have you been talking to?” Before I can answer, he says, “Is it Harry?”
I shake my head as vigorously as I can, but it’s clear Graham doesn’t believe me. He marches into the living room, and after a second, I can see what he’s going for. My phone. He picks it up and unlocks it with his thumb. I hold my breath as he scrolls through my messages and phone calls. Thank God I deleted those text messages from Harry. He was right when he instructed me to do that.
Graham shakes the phone at me. “Did you delete the messages from him?”
“No!” I cry. “I didn’t.”
He grunts. “Yeah, right.”
Holding the phone in one hand, he grabs my left arm again to look at Harry’s number. I squirm, trying to get loose, but his grip is like a vise. With his thumb, he types the number into the phone then hits the button to make the call. I watch him, my heart pounding. He waits long enough that I’m certain the call has gone to voicemail.
“Hey, Harry?” Graham shoots me a look as he says my ex-fiancé’s name. “I found your phone number written on Tess’s arm. I’d really appreciate it if you would leave her the fuck alone from now on. Or else. We don’t need you in our
lives. And I swear to God, if you bother her again, you are going to live to regret it. You get me?”
He ends the call, his eyes still locked with mine. At first, it looks like he’s going to toss my phone back on the table, but instead, he puts it in his pocket. “You’re not getting this back. Ever. I’m sick of this shit.”
“Okay,” I say in a small voice.
His shoulders rise and fall as he takes a breath. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”
I don’t know what to say to that. Losing his temper isn’t the worst thing he has done tonight. He tried to drug me, for God’s sake.
“Listen.” His voice is calmer now. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I have no clue what Harry has been saying to you. I can only imagine. But whatever it is, it’s not true. He doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“Right,” I mumble. All I can think of is that I escaped drinking that water. By tomorrow, I’ll remember everything. And I can work on getting free from this monster.
“Tess, look at me.”
I lift my eyes to meet his. All the anger from a moment ago has vanished. “What?”
“I’m not trying to drug you. You have to believe me. I would never do anything to hurt you.”
I shake my head. “So what was in that drink? I saw
something.”
He rubs at the back of his neck. “You’re right. There was something dissolved in that drink. But it wasn’t anything bad. It was your medications, Tess. Prescribed by the doctor you see for your head injury.”
“What medications?”
“For your seizures.” He tugs at the hem of his T-shirt. “You were getting horrible seizures after your accident. Your whole body would shake, and you hit your head twice when it happened. One of the times you hit your head, the bleeding in your brain got worse. You need to be on your
seizure medications.” He frowns. “But lately, you’ve been refusing to take them because you think I’m drugging you for some reason. So I started putting them in your drink. I’m sorry. I didn’t do it to upset you. I just thought it would be easier this way.”
I think of the ominous message I found scribbled on my thigh this morning. “I don’t believe you.”
“Fine. Do you want me to show you?”
Before I can answer, Graham gestures at me to follow him, and he leads me down the hallway to the downstairs bathroom. If this is a game of chicken, he’s playing it very well. He opens the medicine cabinet and pulls out two orange pill bottles.
“These are your seizure medications,” he says. “We have you on once-a-day medications because getting you to take them in the morning was impossible. I mean, I don’t blame you. You usually have no idea what’s going on in the morning, and you’re not eager to swallow a bunch of pills.”
I take the bottle of pills from him. My name and the name of the drug are written on the bottle and underneath in smaller letters, “FOR SEIZURES.” There’s a doctor’s name and prescribing number.
“You can call the pharmacy if you want,” he says. “I’m telling you the truth. And here…” He takes his phone out of his pocket, types something in, then hands it to me. It’s the website from Mt. Sinai with a photograph of the doctor whose name is on my prescription bottle. Dr. Leonard Sawinski. “That’s your neurologist. He’s not a quack. He’s the chairman of the whole department.”
I look in the bottle of pills. It’s about half full of large capsules. They would be easy to break open and pour into a glass of water.
“They make you pretty groggy though,” he says apologetically. “Usually you just want to go straight to sleep after you’ve had them. But sometimes you realize I slipped you something and freak out.”
Is that what happened last night? I thought he slipped me something and wrote the note to myself?
“I don’t know why Harry keeps bothering you,” he sighs. “Maybe… I don’t know, maybe he believes he’s doing the right thing. Or he’s still in love with you. But I’m the one taking care of you. I’m your husband. I’m just trying to do what’s right. It’s… hard.”
Graham’s head drops down. He almost looks like he’s going to start crying. And I realize at this moment that I believe him. These are real medications. Prescribed by a respected physician.
“Tess?” There’s a groove between his eyebrows. “Say something.”
“I…” I look into the bottle of pills again. “I don’t know.
I’m not sure.”
He squeezes his hands together. “I’m not going to force you, okay? But I want you to take these pills. I’m scared about you having another seizure. Dr. Sawinski said if you have another bleed in your brain, it might affect your ability to walk… or speak.”
I close my eyes. I remember how panicked I was this morning when I woke up and realized nothing was the way I remembered it. What if I woke up and couldn’t speak? What if I woke up and one side of my body didn’t work anymore? This is bad, but it could be worse.
When I open my eyes again, Graham is still standing there. Patiently. Waiting to see what I’ll decide.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll take the pills.”
