Page 20 of Claimed By my Father's Enemies
Shot.
The warm amber light of the restaurant goes a shade colder at its edges. My hand is tight around the phone. I can feel the casing cracking.
"Charlotte," I say. "Hospital."
Across the table Carter is already standing up. Adrian sets his water glass down and looks at me waiting for more information.
"She was shot," the woman says again, quieter. "In the shoulder. The doctors said the surgery is straightforward."
I get up and start walking to the exit. My chair drops to the floor with a too loud bang, with the speed I put into my movement.
Carter and Adrian are behind me. "I'll drive," Adrian says. "I didn't drink."
"I'm on my way. Fifteen minutes." I say to the person on the other side of the phone.
"Don't rush," the woman says. "She's in surgery. It's going to be a few hours. I'm here if anything is necessary."
I get outside and the cold air does nothing to calm me down.
Adrian is already giving the valet the car ticket with a generous tip to make him move faster.
She is going to be ok. She needs to be ok.
"Thank you," I say numbly to the phone. And then, "I appreciate you calling. I'm sorry, who am I talking to?"
The pause is longer this time.
"Sienna."
8
SIENNA
The waiting room smells like antiseptic and bad coffee.
The coffee is Sergeant Walsh's fault. He handed me a cup forty-five minutes ago with a gruff "you look like you need this," and I did. I've been gripping it ever since even though it's gone cold and the cardboard is going soft at the seam where my thumb keeps pressing.
I've tried sitting. The plastic chairs are hard and my body is too wired to stay in one. So I pace instead. Twelve feet of linoleum, turn, twelve feet back. It doesn't help but it's better than stopping, because stopping means the thinking catches up, and the thinking right now is mainly about William.
I look at my hands. Steady on the cup now. They weren't steady on the phone when I called him.
Part of the shaking was because of Charlie. I can still hear the surgeon's reassurance, the wordstraightforwardsaid twice, but even with that, the image of her in that corridor, the wordsurgery, does something to my chest I can't push through by reasoning.
But it wasn't only Charlie. The way my voice went flat and careful when he picked up. The three seconds I needed before I could say a single word.
"She's tough." Sergeant Walsh says it from across the room, looking at me and then at Officer Alvarez, Charlie's partner, who leans against the far wall with her hands clasped and her thumb working the small cross at her neck. "She'll be alright."
He's saying it for all of us, including himself. Something beeps somewhere down the corridor. The overhead light hums. I make an attempt at a reassuring smile and nod.
My thoughts drift back while I pace.
I was just a child when I first noticed William Martin. I remember being in the garden and him laughing at something his father said. He was twenty feet away and didn't pay me any attention. I thought:oh.That was the whole of it. Just that. The garden, the sound of him laughing, the certainty that something in my chest had just changed in a way I wasn't going to be able to change back.
By the time I reconnected with Charlie and we were fifteen, it had grown into the full embarrassing inconvenient weight of it. I used to time my visits hoping to see him. I rehearsed things to say to him. I never got to say them.
That ended.
One night, one sequence of events, and it was done with no room for anything else.
