I Dream of Danger by Lisa Marie Rice Page A

do for you? Well that was a stupid thing to say when the answer was obvious. Pay your bill.
    He spoke again, words that made absolutely no sense. “What?”
    “I said—“ And now Elle could hear the forced patience. He was repeating something for the third time. “I said, Ms. Thomason, that full payment wasn’t necessary, though I do thank you. We had agreed you could stagger your payments.”
    “What?” Her head was ringing. Nothing made sense.
    “Are you all right, Ms. Thomason?”
    No .
    “Ah— Yes, of course. I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    A long sigh. “Your bill has been settled in full. And I wanted to thank you because we had made an arrangement to stagger your payments over a year.”
    She sat up straight, the words having finally penetrated. “The bill has been paid? In full? Who paid that bill, Mr. Bent?”
    He made a startled noise. When he spoke his voice was slow and careful. “You did, Ms. Thomason. Or rather”—the sound of computer keys clacking—“a certain Mr. Ross paid on your behalf. A Mr. Nick Ross.”
    The cordless handheld slipped from her fingers, clattered to the floor. Mr. Bent’s voice rose like a ghost’s, calling her name.
    Elle wrapped her arms around her midriff, trying to contain the pain inside waiting to spill out. It felt exactly as if someone had punched a huge hole in her, ripping out her heart. She rocked, trying to dissipate the pain.
    Of course Nick had paid. He’d come back, briefly. Found her looking like an abandoned stray, bereft of everything, thrown her a mercy fuck, got some groceries in the house, and settled her bill.
    Then left, of course. Why would he stay?
    At some point Mr. Bent must have hung up because the handset on the floor stopped squawking. At some point, the sun moved across the sky. At some point, she stopped shaking.
    At some point she recognized deep, deep in her bones, not just in her head, that Nick was never coming back.
    As the light was fading from the sky, it started snowing and the temperature in the house dropped, became colder yet. When her fingers and toes started hurting, she got up stiffly, muscles and bones aching.
    She moved slowly, as if someone had beat her and she was nursing injuries. Someone had beat her, of course. Nick. It would have hurt much less if he’d actually taken a baseball bat to her because broken bones knit, eventually. Broken hearts? Not so much.
    An animal instinct told her she’d been grievously wounded. Something deep inside her had been broken. She shuffled slowly through the house, touching things Nick had touched.
    There was no energy in her to put the massive quantities of food away. Just seeing all that food made her nauseous. She could barely bring herself to look at it. She shuffled out of the kitchen, closing the door behind her.
    One by one, she closed every door of the house. All the downstairs rooms, pulling the doors gently closed, hardly realizing what she was doing, knowing only that the house should feel the way she did. Empty and closed.
    Somehow it had become dark. She didn’t have the energy to turn on the lights. The darkness somehow fit.
    She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looking up. The stairs seemed interminable, like they went all the way up to heaven, though of course there was no heaven. Just the second floor, and her bedroom. The stairs seemed impossible to climb, though she managed it slowly, step by step. She’d been doing impossible for some years now and she could do this, even though each step felt like climbing a mountain. Her legs were weak and could barely carry her. Halfway up, she had to sit on a step and rest her swimming head on her knees. After a while, she got up again, clutched the banister and pulled herself up, step by step. Feeling a hundred years old, she finally made it to the top and shuffled down the corridor.
    Elle stopped at the threshold of her dark bedroom, closing her eyes and swallowing heavily.
    The room smelled of him.