said Gabbie was psychotic and had threatened him. But with the condition she was in, he didn't have a prayer of anyone believing his story. It was all over for him. He had violated parole in three states, and even if he'd never laid a hand on her, he was going to be serving time all around the country. It was only miraculous that they hadn't caught him sooner. And if they had, maybe he wouldn't have hurt her. But after what he had done to her, he was going to be put away for a long time. They read him his rights and arrested him on the spot. They were charging him with attempted murder, and they were going to see if they could make manslaughter charges stick in the death of the professor. Steve had been right in the end. This was the Big Time. Gabbie listened to them in amazement.
“Will he go to jail?” she asked, still whispering. She didn't have the strength, and it still hurt too much to speak louder. Her ribs shrieked every time she moved or spoke, or even whispered.
“For a long time,” they reassured her, and she nodded. She was sorry all of it had happened. It was all so ugly, and so terrible, and she was still sick about the professor. She would much rather have had him than his money. Before the police left, they told her the boardinghouse was in an uproar that night, and everyone sent her their best wishes. But so far, no one had been allowed to visit. They would come as soon as the doctors let them.
“That's me. I'm the bad guy. You need to rest,” Peter said to her after the police left. “How do you feel?” he asked her, looking concerned. She'd been through a lot of emotion since that morning. Deciding to turn the guy in couldn't have been easy for her, and now hearing the consequences of it. It was a hard thing knowing you had sent someone to prison, even if he deserved it. And for her, there had to be added conflict, since Peter assumed she had loved him. She had, in a way, but it had been more of an entanglement and an addiction. She hadn't known how to get out of it, how to stop giving money to him, particularly once he started pressing her for it. He had been a con man and he had manipulated her, and she had been easy prey for him. But she knew now that she had never really loved him,
“Are you okay?” Peter asked again, and she nodded.
“I think so.” She still wasn't sure what she felt, it was all so confusing.
“It must be difficult, thinking he was your friend.” He could only imagine that her sense of betrayal was beyond measure.
“I don't think I ever knew him. I don't know who he was,” she said quietly, and he saw something in her eyes that touched him. She looked up at him then with a question. “How long will I be here?” She reminded him suddenly of the old lady who had fallen down the marble staircase the night before, and wanted to get to the hairdresser in the morning.
“Do you have a hair appointment?” he asked, smiling at her.
“Not exactly.” Her hair was lost in the bandages somewhere. He could hardly guess what color it was, and hadn't really noticed. “I just wondered.” She spoke very softly.
“A few weeks. Long enough to get you tap-dancing again, or whatever it is you do. What do you do?” He knew from her chart that she was twenty-three years old, single, had no apparent family, lived in a boarding-house, and worked in a bookshop, and nothing much beyond that.
“I'm trying to be a writer,” she said shyly.
“Ever publish anything?” he asked with interest.
“Once. The New Yorker in March.” It was very prestigious and he was impressed to hear it.
“You must be pretty good.”
“Not yet,” she said modestly. “I'm working on it.”
“Well, don't write about this one yet. Let's get you healthy first before you go back to work. Where did you meet this guy anyway? At a convention for ex-convicts?”
She smiled at him, she liked him. He'd been good to her, and she could see that he cared about what had happened to her. Everyone had been nice to her here, even the nurses. “He lived in my boardinghouse.”
“Maybe you should think about getting an apartment. Speaking of which,” he said, glancing