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“Don’t they need my insurance card?” Elizabeth asked, looking over at me with scrunched brows.
“No, it’s all covered,” I assured her.
“That makes no sense,” she decided as she started to slide off the table.
“Whoa,” I said, rushing forward to grab her arm when she teetered on her feet. “Let’s get you out of here, okay?” I asked, holding onto her as I led her back out of the clinic.
“Thanks,” she said numbly as I got in the car and pulled away from the curb.
“Elizabeth, we need to go somewhere to talk. Where do you want to go? A coffee shop? Your apartment?”
“Shouldn’t I be talking to the police?” she asked instead of answering, her gaze looking out the window, seeming a million miles away.
I reached into her purse, finding her wallet, and checking out her address on her license, then heading in that direction while she continued to zone out.
“Miss Riley,” her doorman greeted her, all affability as he went for the door, until he saw the blood on her clothes. “Are you alright?”
“Brian,” Elizabeth said, forcing a painfully fake smile. “Yes. Just an, ah, accident,” she said as we moved into the lobby of her building.
It was a luxe place with wide-plank slate floors, a wooden front desk with massive, pristine mirrors, a seated area with rounded couches, and a bunch of lush greenery that actually looked real.
This kind of place cost a pretty penny.
I didn’t know what, exactly, Elizabeth did for the senator, but she seemed to be paid well.
She led me to the elevators, pushing the button for the sixth floor, clearly still not fully herself, because I couldn’t imagine she would normally just bring a stranger right into her apartment.
It was a nice apartment, too. New hardwood floors, views of the city, a balcony, a nice-sized living room that melted into an all-white and marble kitchen.
Down the hall, it looked like there were two bedrooms.
Elizabeth liked to keep the place light and bright. The windows only had sheers, and they were pulled wide to allow the light to stream in on her off-white living room furniture, and giving lots of sunlight to her giant houseplants.
She had a framed TV across from her couch and chair set, the screen set to switch between different John William Waterhouse paintings. Below it was a line of white bookshelves with glass doors, all the spines turned inward, so all you saw were the cream pages.
The only things in the whole apartment that didn’t fit her very clean aesthetic were the cat scratch post, cat tree, and several beds.
“Nice place,” I said, because it was.
“Thanks,” Elizabeth said numbly, walking to her kitchen to turn on her pricey-looking latte machine. “It’s expensive,” she admitted as she pumped what looked like cookie batter syrup into a mug, the ritual seemingly grounding her, bringing her back to herself. “But it has a lot of amenities,” she told me. “When I did the math on what it would cost to get a cheaper place and pay for all those things separately, this just made more sense. Can I get you a coffee?” she asked as I walked over to the cat who was lounging in the sun near the sliding doors to the balcony, soaking up some rays.
“Sure. However you take it is fine,” I told her, even if I generally didn’t drink flavored coffee. If it helped her relax to make it her way, I would choke it down.
“His name is Kevin,” she told me as the cat purred. “He was my grandfather’s. He’s ancient and mostly deaf, but sweet. Do you have any pets?” she asked, bringing me over the first coffee, then going back to make another.
“Thank you. No. I work too much,” I told her.
“I do too,” she admitted. “But it was me or a shelter,” she went on. “I figured this is better.”
I heard the rattle of a pill bottle and looked over to find her in one of her kitchen cabinets that seemed to serve as a small pharmacy. Catching me looking, she went to shrug, forgetting her stitches, and winced. “Life is a constant battle of trying to decide if it is a migraine that I can manage with some over-the-counter pills, or if I need rescue meds. And then there are the vitamins that are supposed to help,” she said, waving at a line of bottles with matching labels but different words. Calcium, Magnesium, Zinc, Riboflavin.
“My mom used to get debilitating migraines,” I admitted. “If we came home from school to find her in bed with all the lights off, we knew we needed to keep it down. Luckily, they seemed to go away after menopause.”
“Only about twenty more years to see if that works for me too,” she said, giving me a shrug as she took a long sniff of her coffee before taking a sip.
She walked over to the living room, waving toward the couch as she took a seat in one of her chairs. “I’m assuming you’re here because you want to talk.”
“About your boss, it seems,” I agreed, taking a sip of my coffee to put her at ease. “Wow,” I said, brows going up. “This is surprisingly good.”