I wake up in a white room.
At first, I think it’s possible I’ve died and I’m in heaven. But no, heaven wouldn’t look like this. There wouldn’t be so many cracks on the ceiling in heaven. There wouldn’t be a clanging air conditioner next to my bed in heaven. And I probably wouldn’t have an IV in my arm either.
I’m thinking I might be in a hospital.
I struggle to swallow, but it’s hard with my throat so parched. The last thing I remember is the gunshot. Monica had the gun and she pulled the trigger. She shot at Sam.
Oh no…
He’s got to be dead. She shot him point blank.
Except if Monica killed Sam, how did I get to the hospital? She sure wouldn’t have called for an ambulance.
I hear a groan and look to my right, which sets off a throbbing pain in my temple. There’s a blue recliner next to the bed, and lying inside it, covered in a light blanket, is my sleeping husband. He mumbles something in his sleep and shifts, trying to get comfortable.
He’s alive.
Oh my God, he’s alive. And he’s not on life support either. He’s doing well enough that he’s sleeping in my hospital room.
“Sam,” I whisper. He stirs but doesn’t open his eyes. “Sam!”
This time his brown eyes fly open. He sits up in the recliner, a smile creeping across his face. “You’re awake.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “I’m awake.”
He reaches over and takes my hand. His is warm and comforting, which makes me self-conscious about how clammy mine feels. “Thank God you’re okay. I’m was so worried, Abby…”
I rub my eyes with the arm that doesn’t have an IV. “What happened?” “What do you remember?”
I look at his left arm, which seems more or less intact. “You got shot.” “Oh, that?” He pulls his hand from mine to rub at his arm. He winces.
“It was a superficial wound. They bandaged it up in the ER. I’m fine.”
“But Monica…” I bite my lip. “She was pointing the gun at you. She was going to shoot you again.”
Sam lets out a long sigh and drops his head. “She didn’t shoot me.
She…”
I frown at him. “What?” “She shot herself.”
My mouth falls open. “She shot herself?”
He looks down at his hands. “I thought she was going to shoot me. I thought she was going to kill me. I figured that was it. But then… she turned the gun on herself. Put it below her chin and pulled the trigger. I guess when she realized her mother was dead, she just… I don’t know… lost it.”
In spite of everything Gertie did to me, I feel a jab of sorrow over her death. She was my assistant for years—I knew her only as a sweet older woman. I have to believe that couldn’t have all been an act. I’ll miss her smile and her cookies.
I’m not so sure Gertie’s death was the reason Monica shot herself though. I saw the look on her face when Sam tried to protect me. She was heartbroken over her mother, but that wasn’t what pushed her over the edge. She shot herself because she knew I had won.
“I just need you to know,” he says quietly, “nothing ever happened between me and Monica. Nothing. I never touched her. I swear to you.”
“I believe you.”
His shoulders sag. “You do?” “Of course I do.”
He rakes a hand through his hair. “Well, you’re the only one then. The police looked at me like I was a piece of shit, your mother threatened to take me “for everything I’ve got,” whatever that means because I’ve got nothing, and Monica’s stepmother actually slapped me in the face. Apparently, nobody thinks it’s plausible that I wouldn’t have slept with her.” He shakes his head. “Is it really so crazy that I wouldn’t want to cheat on my wife?”
I manage a smile. “Apparently, yes.”
“She really set me up. Told everyone I was her boyfriend or her husband. I had no clue—I feel like a moron for letting it happen.”
“Well,” I say, “she was pretty good at manipulating people. You were the one who didn’t want to go through with the whole thing in the first place. I was the one who talked you into it.”
“I know, but…”
I reach out for him, and he grabs my hand in his again. “I heard everything you said to Monica in our bedroom. I know you weren’t sleeping with her. And…” I swallow, feeling an ache in my dry throat. “I know you jumped in front of me to stop her from shooting me.”
He ducks his head down as he squeezes my fingers. “You’re my whole life, Abby. If anything ever happened to you…”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know what you mean.” The thought of losing Sam was what propelled me forward to hurl myself in front of Gertie back in our bedroom.
He shifts in his seat. “And I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about the drugs. I should have known you’d never do anything like that.”
I nod, although the sting is still there. I wish he had believed me.
“I never thought you killed Denise,” he says. “Honestly. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I didn’t believe that.” He shakes his head. “You know, Monica was the one who told me to buy that letter opener for you. I ran into her when I was picking you up at the office and asked her for anniversary gift ideas. I can’t believe she was planning it even then…”
“She and Gertie were planning it for years…”
When I think of it, I feel sick. All those years when I thought Gertie was a sweet old woman who was doing her best, all she was doing was targeting a husband for her daughter. She knew early on that Sam and I were having fertility problems, and she knew how badly I wanted a baby. She planned to get me out of the way, then have my money and my husband for her daughter.
And then a thought occurs to me. My brain was so foggy when I woke up, I didn’t even think of it. “Sam, the baby…” I feel like I’m choking. “Is the baby… dead?”
A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “No, they managed to deliver him safely. He’s in the neonatal ICU. Doing okay.”
“Oh.”
I exhale, thinking of our tiny baby, hooked up to monitors in an incubator. I dreamed of that baby for so long. I already love him a little bit,
even though I’ve never even seen him. But after what Monica did to us… “It’s okay,” Sam says suddenly.
“What’s okay?”
His brown eyes are sad. “If you don’t want him. I get it.” “Sam…”
“No, really,” he says. “After everything that happened, I’d understand if… well, you know. Anyway, we’ll work something out.”
I try to sit up in bed, but my head throbs. I lie back down again, knowing I’m going to be chained to this bed for at least another day. “Do you want him?”
“Of course I do.” Of course he does.
He’s quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice has a tinge of excitement: “Do you want to see a picture?”
I nod.
Sam whips out his cell phone and it takes him seconds to bring the image up on the screen. He holds his phone up for me, and I squint at the newborn baby on the screen.
He’s tiny. Painfully tiny and helpless and adorable, like the newborn I always dreamed of. He’s got oxygen prongs in his tiny nose and he’s wearing a little white hat and sweater that are really small, yet still impossibly big on him. I can make out five perfect little fingers on his left hand.
“He looks like you,” I say to Sam.
I always thought it was ridiculous when people said babies look like adults. All babies look like little old men. (Yet the converse isn’t true—old men don’t look like babies.) But actually, this baby really does look like Sam. Something about his nose and his lips.
“I thought so too.” He grins at me. “They let me hold him this morning.
Just for a minute, but it was…”
He turns his head away. He’s trying not to get too excited. The mother of this child tried to murder us both, after all. But really, there’s only one right thing to do.
“I want him too,” I say. Sam’s eyes light up. “Yeah?”
“Of course I do. He’s adorable, he’s beautiful, and he looks like you.”
I don’t say the last thing I’m thinking: And he doesn’t have a mother.
“As soon as you’re feeling better,” Sam says, “you have to come with me to see him. Okay?”
I can’t suppress a smile. “Okay.”
“Also…” He winks at me. “We have to come up with a name.”
Right. We get to choose a name for this baby that is now ours—we will be taking him home. Something that seemed like an impossible dream only days earlier.
“I’m so happy we finally have our child,” I sigh. He nods. “I know what you mean.”
“This is what we wanted for so long.” “Yeah…”
“It’s just… it’s hard to know we’re only getting him because his mother is dead.”
Sam is quiet. He has an odd expression on his face that’s making me uneasy.
“What?” I finally say.
He rubs at the back of his neck. “I never said Monica was dead.”
