I take a deep breath. “We slept together, and she wound up in hospital a week later, underweight and with heart problems.”
“Jesus,” Adam says quietly.
I scrub my hands over my face, wishing I could obliterate all the things I did wrong. “I thought she was going to die.”
“She’s all right, though?” he asks sharply.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t a heart attack, just a problem with a valve that’s not life-threatening. But if she doesn’t start eating again, she’ll get weaker and weaker. That’s what carries anorexics off. Heart failure, because the muscle wastes away as they starve.”
Just thinking about it makes my chest feels tight. What we did together is actually killing her. For the first time in my impatient, angry life, I think I may have caused someone real harm, and I’m so fucking scared.
“Have you spoken to her?”
“She wants me to leave her alone.”
“And are you going to?”
I stare at my untouched pint. “I don’t know how to stop, but I’m terrified that if I don’t, I’ll kill her.” I look up at Adam bleakly. “I let her down. I ruined everything, and I have no idea how to fix this, or even if I can.”
We talk for another twenty minutes. Adam doesn’t have any idea what I should do, of course, and neither do I.
I call Petrou twice a day over the next few days, and he’s kind enough to take my calls. Occasionally I can hear his wife in the background, asking if he’s talking to that man again.
He keeps me updated with Lacey’s progress. She recovers from surgery, and then voluntarily admits herself back onto the anorexia ward. I was expecting this, and I’m glad she went willingly, but my heart still hurts for her, remembering what she said about it.
It’s the worst place in the world. You have no idea what it feels like. Not because of what they do to you, though that’s bad enough. Because of the shame you feel in your heart.
“Does the ward allow visitors?”
There’s a pause.
“Stian, best leave her be,” he says gently. “I know you want to help, but—”
There’s a faint scuffling sound, and then a shrill female voice comes on the line. “I forbid you to go anywhere near her! Do you hear me? Lacey was doing just fine until you got your disgusting hands on her. You should know better at your age not to prey on troubled young women.”
“Lacey’s not—”
The line goes dead. I stare at my phone, wondering if that’s what I did. Prey on someone who was struggling, just because I’m obsessed with control. Because I need the drama of a challenge.
I call the ward, and they do allow visitors. When I’m asked who I’m calling about, I tell them I’ll ring them back.
I need to think.
Chapter Twenty
Lacey
I wake to the sight of worn institution-gray paint and feel the scratchy, over-washed pillowcase beneath my cheek. My stomach clenches painfully, as it has every morning since I arrived at the Dawnstead Anorexia Inpatient Ward. From shame. From the knowledge that it will soon be crammed full of food again, and then again and again.
She is furious. She screams in frustration that I allowed myself to be committed a second time. She tells me I’m stupid and disgusting. Why am I even bothering to live if I’ll be greedy and unlovable? I’m a waste of fat, ugly space.
She’s giving me all her greatest hits.
My alarm rings and I swing my legs out of bed and switch it off. My room’s tiny, but at least I have space to myself. All the furniture and floors bear marks of the patients who came before me. I try not to think about where they are now. If they got better. If they came back again. If they died.
Like all the other women on the ward—and it’s just women and teenage girls, though there was a nineteen-year-old boy last time—I dress in loose, drab clothing. None of us want to draw attention to our bodies.
Breakfast is muesli and milk, and we eat it together at one large table without speaking. I look around at my fellow patients. Janice will sit down only at mealtimes, but for the rest of the day she stands in order to burn more calories. Cora is hunched over her food, her corn silk blonde hair hanging around her face. She cries quietly in a corner most afternoons. Taylor hits her bowl with her spoon in a nerve-shattering rhythm. She won’t eat until the nurses threaten to take away her phone for a week. She’s angry all the time, ranting that the doctors are picking on her, that there’s nothing wrong with her, that the whole world is against her. I like her the least because she sounds so much like the other me. I wonder if Taylor is what happens when you allow your anorexic half to assume your whole identity.