A warm hand came to her arm, settled on it.
“Ella?”
Roman. Where was he?
“Can you open your eyes, Ella?”
Her eyes were open. Couldn’t he see that? She squeezed them shut, then opened them again, her lids heavy under brash fluorescent lights.
She tried to push herself up. “Where—?”
“Shh,” Roman said, his hand steady on her arm. “You’re at the hospital. The nurse just needs to draw some more blood.”
The hospital? Not again. Fear pierced her heart and she looked around the room.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice a broken whisper she barely recognized. She glanced down at her arm where an IV had been taped into place. The nurse began filling a vial with blood.
Roman didn’t answer immediately. “Roman?”
“I came by your mom’s house to check on you after you...after our meeting.”
Their meeting. Right. Her skin felt hot. She’d run out on him. She’d gotten confused again. “I’m sorry, I—”
A memory flashed, a gasp escaping her lips. “Did they find him?”
Roman’s expression didn’t change. “Who?”
“The man who did this,” she said, her voice growing stronger. “He was in the house. I was in the kitchen.” The memories rushed back. “I’d opened the fridge, grabbed a bottle of iced tea, and someone was there. He attacked me. He had on black gloves and...” She reached for the memory. “He injected me with something!”
She looked down at her left arm, rotating it slightly in search of the injection site, but she didn’t see any evidence of what had happened. “He dragged me down the hall. I couldn’t move. I felt paralyzed.” After that, she came up blank.
A slight furrow along Roman’s brow showed that he’d heard. Other than that, he didn’t respond.
“All done,” the nurse said quietly, gathering the tubes and the rest of her supplies. “I’ll let the doctor know she’s awake,” she added, letting herself out of the room.
Fear bubbled up in the wake of Roman’s silence. “They didn’t find him,” Ella surmised.
Roman pulled over a chair and sat. He looked tired, his dark hair ruffled, the buttons on his white shirt undone at the top.
“Maybe we should start from the beginning, Ell,” Roman finally said.
Ella’s heart skipped a beat at the old nickname, so warm in his voice a dozen memories melted out of it.
“That’s all I remember from the time I got back to my mom’s tonight.”
“No, I mean—start from when you returned to Maryland. You came because of your mother’s accident, right? Did anything seem off when you arrived?”
“I...don’t know.”
“You don’t remember?”
She shook her head, frustrated and considering how much to reveal to Roman. Since she was asking for his help, she figured she’d be best off with full disclosure. “Since the shooting, I’ve had trouble with my memory,” she admitted. “And my instincts.”
“In what way?” Roman asked.
“It’s hard to explain, but I can’t trust my own mind sometimes,” Ella said. “I get bouts of confusion, short-term memory loss, gaps in clarity. That’s why I took a taxi to see you. I haven’t been cleared to drive. The neurologist called it post-traumatic amnesia. That’s what happened at your office. We were talking and then I suddenly had no idea why I was there, why I was standing face-to-face with you after all these years.”
“Sounds like a scary thing to go through.”
“It’s unsettling.”
“Is it permanent?”
“My doctor says it should get better with time. He can’t predict how long the recovery will take, or whether I’ll ever fully recover.”
“I’m sorry, Ell.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “I just needed you to know.”
“Okay, let’s explore a different question,” Roman said. “If someone wanted you dead, why try to make it look like a suicide?”
She’d considered the question for weeks. “To keep the focus on me and far away from my killer?” she suggested. “If it’s someone I used to know, like you mentioned, maybe he’s hoping my suicide wouldn’t be questioned.”
“Maybe,” Roman said, his dark gaze holding hers and stirring up a longing for what they used to share.
Did he believe her? She couldn’t tell, but she had a feeling he wanted to.
A doctor entered the room, white coat pristine, stethoscope hanging around her neck. She smiled pleasantly and held out a hand to Ella in greeting.
“I’m Dr. Patel,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” Ella responded, waiting for what she knew was to come. “Well enough to go home,” she added.
Dr. Patel nodded, casting a patronizing look down at her. “We’ll monitor you overnight,” she said carefully. “I’ve ordered a psychiatric evaluation for first thing in the morning before we can clear you to go home.”
“I need the police, not a psychiatrist,” Ella responded.
“The police?” Dr. Patel asked.
“I didn’t try to kill myself,” Ella insisted, pushing herself to a sitting position. “Someone attacked me.”
The doctor’s mouth flattened into an expression of forced patience. “I’ll arrange for an officer to meet you here,” she said calmly. “But you understand, Ella, we can’t just send you home without taking precautions after this second suicide attempt in as many months?”
Ella wanted to scream. Considered it. But realized that would only make her look less stable. “What I understand, Doctor, is that someone very clever has tried to kill me twice, and no one believes me.”
The doctor’s expression was unreadable. “You were found in your vehicle, in your mother’s garage, with a rag stuffed in the muffler and a syringe in your hand,” she said gently.
Well, that definitely didn’t make her look any less suicidal.
“The volume of fentanyl-laced heroin you injected yourself with, plus the carbon monoxide from the car, was a potentially lethal combination,” the doctor continued, pausing as if to allow Ella time to absorb the information.
Ella didn’t need time; she knew exactly what fentanyl was—a powerful anesthetic when used in the medical profession and an especially dangerous street drug when combined with heroin.
“If your friend here had arrived just a few minutes later, we may not have been able to save you,” Dr. Patel added.
“I need the police,” Ella repeated because she could tell the doctor’s opinion was set.
“I’ll contact them,” Dr. Patel agreed, but she didn’t look happy about it. She excused herself from the room, pulling the door closed behind her.
“Roman, someone is trying to kill me,” Ella said. “And I don’t know how to prove it.”
“Tell me exactly what you remember,” he said.
She started from the moment she had arrived home earlier in the night, and told every detail she could remember up until the