Page 24

We spendthe rest of the night getting rid of the dead body.

By morning, Hooper is at the bottom of the lake about two hours away from here. We have cleaned all the blood off the floor of the waiting room, although if the police showed up, I’m sure they would be able to find traces of it. Probably big globs of it if they look hard enough. But Kovak says that when they do find Hooper’s body, it’s unlikely they will ever connect him with the clinic.

I just have to hope that he’s right.

The sun has already risen in the sky by the time I get home from the worst night of my life. My scrubs are covered in Hooper’s dried blood, and there is still some blood caked on my hands, but thankfully, I’ve got a coat to cover the worst of it. Mason is home, but he’s a heavy sleeper.

The first thing I do when I get back to our dorm room is head straight for the shower. I strip off my bloody scrubs and abandon them on the floor of the bathroom. I don’t know what exactly I’m going to do with them. I should probably burn them, except I’m not sure how. Anyway, I’ll worry about it later.

I step into the shower and turn the heat up as high as it will go. As it turns out, it goes up pretty high. But I welcome the steaming hot water streaming down on my sore body. The scalding pain takes my mind off of what I just did.

I killed a man. I threw his body into a lake.

I will never be the same.

Okay, I can’t let this drive me out of my mind. I’ll get rid of the scrubs, and eventually, this will all be a distant memory. Things are going great with Heather, and I’m going to keep it that way. I’m going to marry her and spend the rest of my life making her happy. She doesn’t have to ever know the terrible thing I did tonight.

I’m lathering my short red hair with shampoo when a sudden noise in the bathroom startles me. At first, I think it must be Mason, but then I realize that it’s Heather. Naked Heather. In the bathroom. With me.

And my bloody scrubs are on the floor.

I rip back the curtain to discover her standing in the middle of the bathroom, her eyes widening at the sight of the pile of bloody scrubs. “What are you doing?” I cry.

The shock on her face breaks my heart. “I…”

“I’m in the shower!” I shout at her, as if that fact weren’t painfully obvious. “You need to… to get out!”

I am screwing things up really badly. I have been desperate to go to the next level with Heather, and under any other circumstances, I would be celebrating. But I’m too scared to think straight. I need her to leave—now. Before she looks down at the floor.

I finish showering as quickly as I possibly can. Of course, the dirty scrubs are still on the floor, and I don’t know what to do with them. I roll them into a ball, wrap them in a towel, wrap a second towel around my waist, and then I come out of the bathroom.

When I enter the common area, Heather is sitting quietly on the couch. That seems like a good thing—she didn’t storm out in a fury—but I can tell she’s shaken. I also know that there’s no way she’s going to let me get away with this. Heather may be a pushover, but this is a big deal. I just kicked her out of the bathroom. Naked.

“Give me a second to get dressed,” I tell her. “Okay?”

She nods wordlessly. But her gaze is focused on the towel I’m clutching in my hands.

I throw on a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I don’t know what to do with the scrubs, so I just stuff them under my mattress. I need a more permanent solution, but this will have to do for now. When I finally emerge from my bedroom, Heather is sitting on the sofa, hugging her arms to her chest. Her face is very white.

“What’s going on, Abe?” she asks.

I sink onto the couch next to her. I need to gauge exactly what she saw and what she’s thinking. Maybe she didn’t see the bloodstains and all she’s upset about is that I yelled at her. “What do you mean?”

Heather had been staring down at her lap, and she lifts her eyes. “What were those stains on your scrubs?”

Shit.

“What?” I say, stalling for time.

“It looked like blood.”

What else looks like bloodstains? Nothing comes to mind, so I tell her a partial truth: “I was helping Dr. Kovak with a procedure at the clinic. It got a little messy.”

Does she believe me? That wasn’t just a few squirts of blood. Those scrubs had been saturated. And now, she is looking at something, and I’m not sure what it is until I follow her gaze.

She’s looking at my fingernails. They still have blood caked into them.

“You weren’t wearing gloves during the procedure?” she asks me.

I rub my neck with the back of my hand. “I changed them at one point. I guess…”

This is not an adequate explanation by any means, and I can tell from Heather’s face that I’m not fooling anyone. But what the hell am I supposed to tell her? I can’t tell her the truth, that’s for sure. I wish I were a better liar.

She looks me straight in the eyes. “What were you doing last night, Abe?”

Great question.

“Just working,” I say in a hoarse voice.

“You swear?”

Why is she forcing me to lie to her? Why can’t she just freaking let this go? “I swear.”

But she knows I’m not being honest. I’m not sure if things will ever be the same between us. I have screwed things up—maybe forever—with the first woman I’ve ever loved.

And that’s not even the worst part. I still need to figure out what the hell to do with those scrubs.