The nurses wheel me out, and I watch the neon strip lights pass by overhead. I’m not like some anorexics. I don’t deny I’m sick, and I know the steps I have to take to get better. I can feel my world shrinking down to what it was before I met Stian. A teacup-sized existence. A small world. A little life. The water can’t get too deep, otherwise my head will go under.
In the operating room, the anesthetist attaches something to the needle in the back of my hand and asks me to count backward from ten. I reach eight when the drug washes over me, and I slip into unconsciousness.
A moment later, or what feels like a moment later, I hear mum saying my name. Everything’s jumbled and foggy, but she and dad tell me that the surgery went well, and not to worry if I feel strange because I’m on strong painkillers.
I fall back into something far denser than sleep.
I half-wake sometime later in the darkness with the sensation that someone is standing over me. I feel a warm kiss against my forehead, and hear a few soft, deep words in a strange language. Or maybe I just dream it.
Chapter Nineteen
Stian
The Laxos exhibition opens four days after Lacey’s surgery. There’s a drinks reception at the museum on opening night. I don’t want to go, but I force myself to attend. No one at the museum knows about Lacey and me. I thought that would make it easier, but it’s draining, pretending that everything’s normal when my strung-out heart is with her.
The exhibition space is packed when I go downstairs. The guests are admiring all the artifacts and reading the descriptions that Lacey wrote. I don’t want to spend too long with any one person, so I make up a lot of things I have to check on and then after forty minutes I slip away.
I get home to a house that feels even emptier than usual and consider calling Petrou. I haven’t heard from him since he called to say that Lacey came out of the surgery just fine. I already knew she had because I saw her myself and talked to the surgeon before I left the hospital. He’d seen me with the Petrous and assumed that I had the right to ask.
Everywhere I’ve gone since, I’ve carried the haunting vision of Lacey in that hospital bed, unconscious from the anesthesia, needles in her hand and wires connected to her body. Deathly pale and weak, with an unfathomable darkness in her head. She should be a happy and healthy woman with worries no greater than getting her best marks in her Masters course. Instead, she’s facing weeks, maybe months, of pain and struggle. More therapy, more weigh-ins, more darkness.
I meant what I said to her in the hospital. I’m not giving up on her, but right now I don’t know what to do that won’t screw things up for her even more.
My phone rings suddenly. It’s in my hand, and I answer it without looking at the screen. “Blomqvist.”
“Well, hello to you, too. Fancy a pint?”
It takes a moment for me to place the voice. “Adam. Hi. Sorry, not right now. I’m busy with…”
“Stian? You sound like shit. Is everything all right?”
I rub my eyes. “Not really, no.”
“Meet me at the pub in half an hour.”
I suppose I could use a drink. “All right.”
The evening is the first chilly one of the new season, overcast and gray, though the leaves on the trees are still green. We sit out the back away from the twenty or so people watching a sports game in the bar. Adam gets us pints and then sits down across from me, his face creased with worry.
“What’s happened?”
I don’t even know where to start. How do you tell someone you nearly killed a girl? “My assistant, Lacey. We got involved.”
To his credit, Adam doesn’t crow or say, I knew something was going on. He just nods and waits for me to continue.
“She’s a recovering anorexic. We got involved very slowly, but very intensely. I thought we were both managing. The work we had to do, but also…” I make a vague gesture, not wanting to go into all the details about the nature of our relationship. “Us. She was seeing her therapist, and she was even able to eat lunch in the same room as me. That’s one thing she’s extremely sensitive about. She can’t stand people seeing her eat.”
I know I’m rambling. I’m punch-drunk, unable to figure out where it all went wrong.
“I thought we were doing so well, and that I was being so patient with her. She wasn’t experienced with men at all, because of the anorexia.”
I remember her sitting next to me on the sofa, asking for time to think. I should have known then there was something fatally wrong. I didn’t see how terrified she was about bringing what we had into the real world until it was too late.