The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,77

turning around slowly. “Jesus,” he said, “there you are.”

“Bennett?”

He walked down the steps—out of his scrubs, in jeans and a T-shirt—and slowed as he approached, looking at the trees behind me. “I tried calling. Your car was here and you weren’t answering the door, and you mentioned that detective . . .” He swallowed, ran his hand through his hair. “I was worried.”

I checked my phone, saw the time, realized Bennett must’ve come straight from work. He’d mentioned calling me when he was free, and I’d been unreachable.

I wasn’t sure what to make of him here. Once someone knew the truth, there was always some ulterior motive to interactions. And so it sat in the pit of my stomach, this gently gnawing unease.

Then I thought I wasn’t being fair. This was entirely within character for Bennett. Elyse up and left, and he couldn’t get ahold of me—as if he could feel the pieces spinning out of his control and was desperate to pull them back.

“I called one of Elyse’s former employers,” I said, changing the topic, because there was no good answer to why I was out in the woods behind my house after the detective had asked to speak to me. “There was some implication about shady inventory practices at her previous hospital.”

Bennett cursed under his breath. “How did that get through the hiring process?”

“I don’t think it was known at the time. But she moved around a lot. It doesn’t seem like her, to be honest, but that’s what they said.” Elyse hadn’t seemed anything like my mother had, with the sudden shift in demeanor, the unpredictability, and the money draining in inverse proportion.

But we both knew that sometimes it could be more hidden than that. Especially in the health care field. The percentage of addiction was the same as in the general population; the only difference was access. In a medical facility, things could go missing easily on their way to the intended patient. Saline substituted for morphine. We’d all heard of cases of the diversion of medicine. It was how my mother first started, I believed. The inventory at her fingertips in the homes where she worked. The easiest accessible remedy.

It was why we had a tight inventory process at the hospital. But it could be hard to catch when the medicine was supposed to be heading out and just not reaching its intended recipient.

Or when you were in a drawer for something justified and seized the opportunity.

“What were you fighting about, Bennett? That day at my house?” I wondered if he had suspected her; if he’d made some veiled accusation that had sent her running.

He sighed. “We were both emotional, and she was running on no sleep, obviously. She was going on and on about watching out for who showed up, telling me to keep a lookout at the window, and I thought she was being ridiculous. And she started yelling, like, There’s a dead fucking body, obviously I’m not overreacting. And I said she was in no shape to work, not even in enough shape to care for you, and to get out of there. And that’s the last thing I heard from her.”

I stared at him.

“I know, I know. I might’ve said Get the fuck out of here.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. It was the same thing he’d said to me when he found me in the medicine room. “Hearing it back now, it sounds worse than I thought. I told her she was in no shape for work. I told her to go, and she did. Of course, if she was an addict, the behavior would make sense, that paranoia . . .”

“She wasn’t paranoid,” I said. Not usually. Not that I’d noticed. She was more free-spirited than I was. She was open, and let herself be vulnerable, and flirted with bartenders. But she also came to the hospital as soon as she’d heard, kept watch over me, cooked me food, stayed while I slept. With Elyse, I’d thought I was seeing another possible path my life could’ve taken, but maybe I was only seeing another iteration of the same. Another girl, another story being told in the aftermath by the pieces left behind.

I walked up the back steps, and Bennett shifted out of the way so I wouldn’t brush up against him. I unlocked the door: “Are you coming in?”

“Yeah.” Everything was a beat too slow, just slightly forced. We’d left things awkwardly the last time he