One Second After Another (The After Another Series #3) - Bethany-Kris Page 0,61
of shoes had the doctor moving away from Penny. She realized then that she was starting to feel something, too. The graze of soft, careful fingers on her face as a sticky sound pulled away from her skin.
Then, the room was dark again.
And the nurse was back. “Your water and stick sponge.”
“Thanks.”
“Have you told them, yet?”
“Told them what?” the doctor asked.
“The cops,” the woman replied. “They asked to be notified if there was any change in her appearance. Not that I expect men to notice when it’s only a month’s worth of growth, but her roots ... they’re a different color. It’s not black, but it might not be what it was supposed to be, either. A black, chemical dye can sometimes affect the color of the first few inches of new growth. Especially if the hair was quite light, to begin with.”
Silence answered the nurse.
But then, the doctor replied, “They’ll notice eventually. I doubt her natural hair color is in any way related to the fact she was shot in the heart at a close range.”
The beeps became louder soon after, and Penny drifted away from the voices. Toward the rhythmic pump of her heartbeats. A steady sound, but different, she knew.
It sounded different.
But hell ... at least it was beating.
“I’VE BEEN TOLD YOU’VE made remarkable progress in the last month, Miss Doe. Brain function is returning, and you’re even showing some communication at times. So, today we’re going to try answering a few questions, and then maybe I can finally put together the pieces of this puzzle you seem to be. Blink once for yes, and twice for no. Do you understand?”
Penny, propped up in the hospital bed so that she had a clear vision of the end of the bed and the detective standing there with his notepad in hand, did nothing. She didn’t blink, grunt, or otherwise. If they brought the right doctor or nurse in, then she might consider it.
But not while a cop was there.
Two months in a constate state of helplessness being fed through a tube was not what Penny had wanted, but she also hadn’t been given a choice. And since her identity was still a mystery to the hospital workers and the police, they had begun working more and more towards a recovery where she was capable of decent communication.
She understood.
She didn’t always comply.
“Do you understand?” the man asked again.
He’d introduced himself when he first came into the room, but she didn’t care to remember his name when there was a revolving door of officers who came to speak to her, or about her, for that matter. He was just one of many, and not that important. The man was only doing his job, and in a way, help her, but that wasn’t how this would work.
It couldn’t.
Penny was a ghost.
She would always be, now.
God.
She wasn’t even supposed to be—she shouldn’t exist. The agreement to forfeit her life for the ability to kill her mother without interference had been final. Yet, there she was ... very much alive.
Penny couldn’t waste the chance. Not when it might mean keeping a promise she never should have made in the first place. Not when it might mean turning a lie she had told someone else into a truth that she–
“Excuse me a moment,” the cop said, stopping Penny’s thoughts from going any further. She almost wanted to laugh at his politeness in the fact of her—well, her complete lack of response—but she couldn’t. The only thing she could do now was blink, breathe, think, and lay in a damn bed.
And she wasn’t answering questions.
Not a single one.
FOOTSTEPS PULLED PENNY from a restless sleep. Still propped up in the bed, she watched the doctor—the one everyone simply called Carter—approach the side of Penny’s bed. The papers in his hands shuffled a bit before he placed them out of her line of sight. He’d had the nurses remove her feeding tube earlier, explaining it away with the promise of soft food soon to test her swallowing. It hadn’t been a pleasant experience, she had more nerve sensitivity than she’d realized, when they pulled the tube out.
She hoped he wasn’t there to tell her they would be putting it back in.
Other than an occasional check, the nurses and doctors didn’t visit her at night. Especially not after she had been moved from Intensive Care. The police came around less often, but now it was dedicated officers tasked to her case.