Page 10 of Hello Stranger

“Did they have to pump you full of saline or something?”

“What? No.”

“You just kind of look like James Gandolfini right now. That’s all I’m saying.”

Okay. We were done here.

“Hoo-boy,” I said, checking the nonexistent watch on my wrist. “Look at the time.”

Then I rolled over to face the wall.

“Is she pouting?” Parker demanded as Lucinda took the phone back.

“You’d be fussy, too, if it had happened to you.”

“But it would never happen to me. If I ever get run over, it’ll be by an Aston Martin.”

A thousand years later, after Lucinda finally hung up and was ready to go, she paused by my bed, looking me over as if she couldn’t begin to fathom my life choices.

“I hope the Betty Ford Center isn’t next for you,” she said then, shaking her head like I was an unsolvable mystery. “They said you showed up in the ER positively dripping in red wine.”

At the words, I sucked in a breath. “Where’s the dress?”

“What dress?”

“The one I was wearing. When I got here.”

“Oh,” Lucinda said, shaking her head with disgust. “It’s in the trash.”

“The trash?” I grabbed the bed rail.

“It was ruined,” Lucinda said. “Wine-drenched, bloodstained—andthe paramedics had to cut it off you. It’s not even fit for cleaning rags now. Unsalvageable. I told the orderly to throw it away.”

I don’t remember starting to cry, but by the time Lucinda paused, my face was wet, my throat was thick, and my breathing was shaky. “They threw away the dress?”

“It was trash, Sadie,” Lucinda said, doubling down. “It was beyond hope.”

But I shook my head. “But I need it,” I said.

Lucinda lifted her eyebrows, like,This better be good. “Why?”

“Because…” I started.

But there was nothing to say. Lucinda had spent her entire marriage to my dad trying to erase all traces of my mother. If she’d known that dress was my mom’s, she’d have thrown it away even sooner.

And maybe set a match to it first.

“… Because I just do,” I finished.

Lucinda stepped back then and eyed me as if to say,Just what I expected.Like she’d called me on my insultingly obvious bluff. “It’s gone,” she said on her way out the door. “Just let it go.”

But after she left, I pressed the button for the nurse.

When she showed up, I was crying so much, she took my hand and squeezed it. “Deep breaths. Deep breaths,” she said encouragingly.

Finally, through breaths that were more like spasms, I conveyed the question. “The dress—I was wearing—when I came here—my stepmother said—to throw it away—but I need it. Is there any way to—get it back?”

Her sigh seemed to deflate her entire body. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said—and by the end of those first two words alone, I knew all hope was lost. “If we threw it away, it went to the incinerator.”

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