Clearly he had no intention of telling me where she’d gone, but he didn’t need to be so obnoxious about it. I started to leave again and his voice reached out, scratching the edge of my soul. “You don’t want to get better, do you?”

I turned back to him. His odd statement wouldn’t settle in my mind. “I was going to say the same thing to you,” I whispered.

“But I killed three people.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Yeah?” he asked, looking a bit incredulous. “That’s it? All you say is ‘Yeah, I know’?”

“It’s a fact. It isn’t a judgment.” Kori’s words flicked off my tongue. “It is what it is. You were in an accident that killed three people. Of course you’re going to blame yourself, you’re still alive.”

“Yeah, but alive isn’t always living. Is it, Serena?” He lifted back his sheet and chills tore along my arms as my eyes took in the stockpile of pills he had wrapped in a washcloth. “Should I tell Kori hello for you?”

twenty

Parker’s revelation disturbed me. I wondered why he told me about the pills, his plans. Did he want me to stop him? Tell my mother? Or maybe he just wanted me to know how sorry he was for killing Kori. No matter what his reasons were, I wished he hadn’t. Now those pills were whispering about how quickly they could take me to her. How easy. How perfect. How painless.

After our visit, I ditched Doc Ramsey in the hospital parking lot, fully intending to return to Parker’s room and see if he would share. As I headed for the hospital’s back stairs, I ran into Marci Mancini—literally—knocking her pamphlets out of her hand. She scrambled to grab them up before I could read them.

“You know what the Monty Python boys say … ,” I said.

“Huh? What?” She was too embarrassed and upset to answer right away, but quickly recovered. “Oh, from the Gwyneth movie, right? ‘No one expects the Spanish Inquisition’? Who are the Monty Python boys anyway?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “So, are you going to have the baby?”

She glanced at me, looking a little scared and a little shocked. I fished the sonogram picture out of my bag and handed it to her.

Her eyes lit in a mixture of mortification and excitement. “Um, yeah, I think I am.” She stared at the sonogram. I couldn’t even fathom the kind of a decision Marci had been wrestling with. To have her baby, she would have to give up everything she knew. A gentle smile spread over her lips. “No. I know I am.”

That surprised me. Naturally my next thought was who’s the daddy? But I knew better than to ask her that.