A 12-Year Love Turned to Nothing Chapter 05
When I woke, the pain in my chest was so sharp it felt like the wound might tear open again if I so much as moved.
I forced myself to sit up. Chase, keeping watch at my bedside, rushed to steady me. “Nora, just tell me what you need, and I’ll take care of it. The wound hasn’t scarred over yet-moving around will only hurt you.”
He adjusted the hospital bed to a more comfortable angle, settling me in, then made a call to the office.
“Nora’s hurt. I don’t trust a hired nurse to look after her properly. I need to be here myself. Leo, I’m not coming in for the next few days. Sorry to ask, but I need you and the other managers to hold things down.”
I had no interest in whatever Chase was saying. All I wanted to know was how my mother was doing. Had they managed to save her?
I gritted through the pain in my chest and tried to force myself upright. That was when the door burst open. and Dr. Larry Musk, my mother’s attending physician, stormed in, his face dark with anger.
“How many times do I have to say it? Mrs. Sutton’s condition was critical, that she could go into crisis at any moment. Someone needed to be with her at all times.
“How could you people be so irresponsible? You left the patient alone in her room. By the time we found her, she’d already lost all vital signs. Her body had already gone rigid.”
Chase stared at the doctor blankly, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
In the chaos of the moment, he’d been so focused on saving me that he’d forgotten about Gina entirely.
He’d never imagined she’d slip away so suddenly.
Chase pulled me tight against him as I shook uncontrollably, patting my back over and over. “Nora, don’t blame yourself. Nobody expected her to go so fast. This isn’t on you. If you need to cry, cry into me.”
Even now, Chase still believed my mother’s death had been nothing but a tragic accident-a lapse in care.
Something in me snapped, and I swung my hand and slapped him across the face with everything I had.
The wound in my chest tore open. The pain was unbearable, and I nearly blacked out.
I stared him down, my smile bitter. “Chase, do you know why I went after Alice with a knife?
“It was her. She stood in front of my mother and called me a mistress, and the shock sent her into cardiac arrest. And it was Alice who blocked me when my mother needed emergency care, so Mom missed the critical window and died right in front of me! She killed my mother. I’m going to kill her.”
“No-that’s not possible. Alice would never do something like that!”
Chase defended her on instinct.
But once he’d had a moment to think it through, doubt started creeping in.
Alice was a sweet girl, sure, but showing up at Gina’s hospital room in the position she was in hadn’t exactly been appropriate.
And there was something else. Gina had always treated Nora like she was precious beyond words-if she’d been conscious when that knife went into Nora’s chest, he was certain he would have heard her cry out to stop it. He hadn’t heard a single sound from her.
If Gina had been lucid, there was no way she wouldn’t have tried to stop it.
Unless, by that point, she’d already…
If Gina really had died while Alice was in the room, then Alice genuinely was a suspect.
Chase frowned.
Things had been so chaotic when Nora got hurt that he’d overlooked a lot of details at the time.
Now that he thought it through carefully, plenty of it didn’t add up.
