Page 42 of Saltwater

“Let me see,” Marcus says, dragging my hand away from my mouth, and I let him look it over, wrap it in a dozen cocktail napkins.

“I think it will be okay,” I say.

It felt like I kissed the bone.

“Let’s give it a few minutes,” Naomi says.

And I see it, the way she’s watching Marcus. Her eyes sliding back and forth between my hand and his. This trip is her first opportunity to supervise our interactions close up, and I wonder if that’s why he invited me. To prove to his wife he hasn’t been sleeping with his assistant. I would laugh—Marcus is the only one who has never mademe uncomfortable, not like that—but for the pain, which is now setting in, a deep, thick aching.

“I’m calling a doctor,” Marcus says, and he steps away from the table, scrolls through his phone, holds it to his ear.

“It’s fine,” I say. But they’re all looking at the cocktail napkins, the cocktail napkins I have already bled through.

“Let us get you a doctor,” Helen says. “I promise we won’t leave without you.”

I don’t know if she realizes her promise is really a threat. Maybe she does.

—

Marcus cradles my wristwhile the doctor puts in three tidy stitches, his thumb resting idly against my vein. It’s impossible to imagine there’s still blood in there after how much I’ve bled, but of course there is. Lots of it, in fact.

“How does it feel?” Marcus asks me.

“Fine,” I say.

It’s the truth. I’ve had worse.

I try to wrest my arm free, but the concierge doctor tuts. When he arrived, in neatly pressed chinos and carrying a black leather bag, Marcus offered to go in with me. Now the doctor pulls a piece of black thread through my thumb, and I wish it were worse. Bad enough that no one would expect me at dinner.

“Do you feel up to running an errand tonight?” he asks me quietly.

The envelope.

“Of course,” I say. “I could go now, if you like.”

I sound too eager, even to myself.

“No.” Marcus shakes his head. “Have you noticed Stan talking about Sarah recently? Just in casual conversation.”

“I haven’t,” I say.

It’s an empty echo. Stan can’t help himself. But he’s not the only one—so many people are always asking about Sarah. Maybe they never stopped.

“You don’t think he could have sent the necklace?” he says, his voice low.

“Stan?” I ask.

I stare longingly at the doctor’s bag, wishing I could fish out a bottle of benzos or oxy or just a muscle relaxant, for fuck’s sake. I need something to help me get through anything having to do with Stan.

“Maybe tonight you could just listen? Talk to whoever else might be on the boat? See what Stan says while we’re not around? And then afterward, we might need you to go to shore. Late.”

“Whatever you need,” I say.

I’m better. Less earnest. I’ve stopped bleeding.

“I’ll let you know later,” Marcus says.

They haven’t decided if they’re going to pay. Not yet, at least. The rich are always so cheap. Maybe Helen was right and we should have asked for five million. She never wanted ten.I did.

---