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Mouth still watering, I spit on the floor. “What? No,” I rasp, blinking rapidly at her, the back of my head throbbing.
“Sunny, you just took a bath in bacteria soup. And it looks like you hit your head. Don’t fight me on this,” she says, cutting off my protest.
Bacteria soup.
Someone starts laughing.
“O-kaaaay. Come on.” She drapes my arm over her shoulders and half-drags me up the uneven stairs.
I realize from the rumbling sensation in my chest that the laughter is coming from me. I clamp my mouth shut, wincing when the tension travels to the back of my skull, making pain burst anew.
“Fuck, you’re heavy,” Lara huffs as we get to the car. She props me up on the hood and disappears to the back, reappearing a moment later with a blanket. She wraps it around me, then wrenches the car door open, shoves me unceremoniously inside, and slams the door shut.
The blanket doesn’t do much to warm me, the cold seeping into my bones and making my teeth chatter. I press my forehead into the windowpane as the car rumbles to life, relieved by the cool pressure.
Time slips, seconds and minutes bleeding together as my eyes start to droop.
Heavy…they feel so heavy, but the rest of me feels so light. If I close my eyes, will I float or sink?
“Sunny, you need to stay awake, okay?” I like the voice. It’s a nice voice.
“Sunny,” it barks at me again, and I like it less now. I just want to sleep. Why won’t she let me sleep? It’s what I need.
I’ll go to sleep. When I wake up, I’ll be as good as new again.
Chapter Twelve
Bellamy
Stress has always been a trigger for my nightmares. I’ve been tossing and turning all night, despite Delphine’s attempts to soothe me with murmured lullabies and her fingers stroking my hair.
When I’m awake, it’s the memories of Sunday that rip me in two. The younger version that was soft and kind, the one who fed me every single scrap of confidence he could. But no matter how much he gave to me, it was never enough to stop me from starving as soon as he was gone.
Maybe that’s why I was so quick to jump into marriage with the first person to shower me with affection—why I looked past the red flags and allowed myself to become little more than a trophy wife.
Eventually, I fall back into a fitful sleep, the memories becoming hazy as my brain drifts to another time.
The back of Sunday’s hearse becomes the back of a different vehicle. My legs shorten and grow chubby with toddler fat, kicking gently as I watch the world go by; green and gray blurring past the windows. There are voices, but I don’t understand all the big words in my dreams.
There’s a loud screech, but I’m too young to know what it means. Too young to understand when Mommy’s hand flies out, her fingers pinching into my skin, that she’s not trying to hurt me.
But when the car spins out, I realize it’s nothing like the ride Daddy took me on at the fairground earlier that day.
In my dreams, it’s always the lights first. Bright flashes distract me from the shattering sound of glass and Mommy’s piercing screams.
Daddy is quiet.
The car rolls violently, my body tumbling over and over until the scream coming out of my mouth becomes loud enough to wake me up.
My eyes jerk open, my stomach still rolling like the car in my nightmare.
I squeeze my eyes shut until the ceiling stops rotating, reaching out blindly with my power, hoping Delphine will hear me.
The signal is messy, but she gets it. The mattress dips and her fingers thread through mine. Her murmurs smooth the edges of my panic until my heartbeat returns to normal and the sweat cools on my skin.
This is all I have left of my parents. A twenty-second faceless memory.
The authorities couldn’t find anything on them after the accident. It was like they didn’t even exist—no names, no photos, no addresses, no insurance connected to the car. Just a miracle baby with his name stitched into his backpack, surviving something he shouldn’t have.
