Page 59 of Ruthless Consequences

“I’m looking for my wife,” I say to them.

“Lucila Girardi doesn’t have a hus—” the nurse starts, but my name being called from behind me makes me turn to look.

“Lilo?” Lucila says again.

She’s pale, like the first time she passed out in front of me, but I can tell her coloring is coming back. Her lips are not white, and she’s standing on her own. She’s slipping her jacket over her arms as she stares at me.

I help her get an arm in, feeling the need to hold her up. “What happened?”

She shrugs. “Same thing as before. But my levels look good. They think I might have had low blood sugar.”

“You’re not eating again,” I say.

“I am. It’s just not enough—can we go?”

I look at the nurse.

“Doctor released her a few minutes ago.” She shrugs and walks off.

The two off-duty cops leave as we do. They glance at me once before heading to wherever they had come from in the first place. Lucila stays silent as I keep a hand on her arm and we walk outside.

It’s the first time I notice Sonny there, standing against the building.

“You need a ride?” I ask him.

We have an understanding. Ever since he found me in his house and flung a beer bottle at my head. He knew who I was. Understandably, he didn’t want me there or near his daughter. But after I told him I wasn’t going anywhere, that I’d be good to her, it almost seemed like his shoulders had deflated. He was relieved I’d be taking care of her. Sonny’s a man with an irreparable crack, and he doesn’t fire on all cylinders. It’s hard to tell if that’s from getting hit with a car or because his wife was a no-good bitch who drugged his children and then ran out on them. Maybe it’s a combination of both.

Lucila looks between us but says nothing. He walks off after we do.

“He came,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“The doctors talked to him?”

“Yeah. But like last time, he told them to discuss everything with me first. Unless I’m dying—” She shrugs.

Unless she’s dying, he only wants to know if she’s willing to tell him. That was what he told the doctors last time. I told him because the doctors wanted to know if anyone in his family, or on his ex-wife’s side, had the condition.

A few minutes later, we’re back on the road. She’s quiet, looking out the window but keeping her hands to the heater. I ask her if she’s hungry. It takes me calling her name twice before she looks at me. I repeat the question and she says, “I can eat.”

That somewhat pacifies me, but not entirely. Overall, she’s not chatty, but she usually has more to say. She’s gone completely quiet, and it’s making me uneasy.

We stop at Mamma’s and grab some food to go. When we’re back in the car, she goes silent again and doesn’t even comment about where we’re going. Not until we pull up to the lot and park.

She looks out the windshield, trying to see between the clumps of snow that have already stuck to the window, and the flurries spiraling past it.

“Where are we?”

“At the gym,” I say.

She faces me for the first time. She wants to call me a smart-ass because it’s apparent where we are. But questions are building in her eyes. Before she can start asking them, I grab her and the food, and we head inside. But we don’t go inside the gym. We go inside the place next to it.

“Whose place is this?” she asks when we step inside.

The smell of fresh paint and hickory from an extinguished fire lingers in the air. It’s apparent the old place has been updated, but the bones remain the same. As for furniture, there’s an old table set in the dining room, an old sofa in the living room, and nothing but a new mattress, with new bedding, and a tiny old dresser in the master.

I don’t answer. I take the food from her and set it on the table. Then I help her out of her coat, hanging it on an old coatrack that was left behind.

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