Chapter 5 - THE VOICE IN THE DARK
Willa knew nobody in this corrupt house would believe her.
She was a disgraced, blacklisted nurse with no home and a fraudulent criminal-negligence finding permanently attached to her name. Whitfield was a wealthy, highly respected private physician employed exclusively by one of the most powerful families in Illinois.
So she began working in total silence.
She did not abruptly stop Everett’s medication. A human body chemically sedated for eight months could easily experience fatal organ collapse under sudden withdrawal. Instead, she adjusted the concentration little by little, secretly replacing a tiny fraction of Whitfield’s toxic mixture with medically safe saline solutions during her shifts, meticulously recording every physiological response in her notebook.
And every night, once the estate fell completely quiet, she sat beside his bed and read to him.
She started with an old, leather-bound novel she found on the study shelf, but quickly abandoned it, deciding instead to talk about her own life.
She told him about her first night working the intensive care unit, when a terrified teenage car-crash victim had gripped her hand so tightly her fingers went numb until sunrise. She told him about the bitter day she lost her license. She told him how her mother, trapped in the fog of dementia, sometimes looked directly at her in the nursing home and called her “the nice nurse.”
One night, halfway through a quiet story about her childhood dog, Willa closed the notebook and looked down at his still face.
The faint scar over his eyebrow caught the pale moonlight streaming through the window.
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“You know why I talk to you?” she whispered softly, resting her hand lightly against the edge of the blanket. “Because for three years, nobody listened to a single word I said. And out of everyone in this mausoleum, you’re the only one who doesn’t have a choice.”
Beneath the heavy wool blanket, deep inside the black ocean where he had been trapped for eight months, Everett Kane finally moved his thumb.
