And if that hidden shard of me knows where Goodnight is, I’m going to find him and kill him.
I sit until the sun comes up, waiting for my ghosts to show. They don’t. I stare at Rob’s gorgeous bag. I can’t take my eyes off it.
‘What are you doing?’ Rob asks sleepily. He sits up in bed, tousled and doe-eyed with sleep.
‘I’m hungry, but I don’t trust myself enough to go anywhere alone. Not even downstairs,’ I reply. ‘It doesn’t matter that I’m on my meds again. I was still on my meds when I wrote most of this without knowing it.’ I gesture to my journal. ‘And maybe I did a lot more than write.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ he says quietly.
‘You sure about that? I’m dangerous, Rob. You’re not safe around me.’
Rob nods, his brow furrowed. ‘I’m not afraid of you.’ I smile at him gently. ‘That’s because you think you know me.’
Rob leaves the room to allow me to bathe and dress.
He waits outside my bedroom door. It doesn’t leave me a lot of time to decide what I’m going to do next, but it’s enough.
We join my grandparents downstairs and slip easily into our most gracious facades. Rob handles them perfectly. He must have been handling them since I showed up three nights ago, or they wouldn’t have allowed him to share my bedroom.
‘How are you feeling, Magdalena?’ my grandmother asks gravely as she serves out the scrambled eggs.
‘Much better, thank you,’ I reply with a relieved smile. ‘I don’t know why I thought I could do it without taking my medication. I felt better, so I thought – why keep taking them?’
My grandfather nods sagely. ‘I did the same thing with my blood pressure medication once.’
‘Almost died of a heart attack,’ my grandmother adds on cue.
‘Magda has a condition, but it’s manageable,’ Rob says. He offers me some orange juice, and when I decline, he offers it to my grandmother first, and then my grandfather, before serving himself. Ever the gentleman.
My grandmother beams at him. ‘Well, we’re so lucky to have you, Rob. It was so brave of you to—’
‘No, it’s OK,’ Rob interrupts, hastily refusing praise. ‘We don’t need to go back over it. Let’s just put the whole thing behind us.’
‘Hear, hear,’ my grandfather says, raising his coffee cup like it’s champagne.
And that’s it. We eat our eggs and fruit salad, and drink coffee, and talk about my grandmother’s garden and what I’m going to do with myself for the rest of the summer.
We decide that stability is what I need, and that working at the shelter was good for me. If Maria still wants me to work there, that is. After breakfast Rob agrees to take me to the shelter so I can repair things with her. I bring my keys to the office and the walk-ins, just in case I can’t repair things and Maria wants them back.
‘You know, Maria called once while you were sleeping,’ Rob says as he drives his rare, classic car slowly down the winding, forest-lined road.
‘Did you speak to her?’ I ask.
Rob nods. ‘I told her you were really sick. She said she understood.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure she did,’ I reply, sighing. Now Maria thinks I’m using again. Which, technically, is true.
Rob glances over at me. ‘You don’t have to worry about your job,’ he tells me. ‘She’s cool.’
I frown. ‘I didn’t know you knew her,’ I say.
‘I don’t know her, know her,’ he fumbles. ‘I mean . . . I spoke with her. I’ve met her before. But, she’s got to be cool because look at what she does, right?’
I nod and watch him. Then I look out the window. ‘Right.’
As soon as we walk into the kitchen through the delivery door, I realize I shouldn’t have come back. I should have called and quit.
Gina walks past carrying a chafing dish. She sees me and Rob and freezes. Even with the painted-on eyebrows, I can see that she’s surprised. She looks between the two of us, and then her eyes really land on me and turn down in sadness for a second before she whirls away and goes to hide from me in one of the walk-ins.