You call this fate?

Chapter 43

Doctor Williams was very cross. He might not be telling me this explicitly, but I could guess from to the tight line his mouth was pressed into, the little slits his eyes had narrowed into, the barely repressed tension in his little shoulders, and possibly the dirty glares he kept shooting my way as he fixed my hand up in the hospital's emergency room.

I pretended not to notice, adjusting the plain white blanket over my lap like everything was right in the world.

We were the only ones in the room this time. Christopher and Tasha had gone to finally get the girls and Granny, Mrs. Rodwell was still with her son, and the rest of the Williams were I knew not where. Probably back home-a place Charles would rather be at than bandaging my hand.

I had four broken bones, three displaced joints, and a particularly deep laceration across the top of my palm from a sharp edge of the rock I hadn't noticed. All in all, the pain that had started on the way back to town had not been my overactive imagination.

"Doctor," I tried after five minutes of his glowering over me, "I am pretty sure this isn't that bad. You don't need to be so angry."

He snorted explosively.

"You should just have sent someone else to tend to me if you were going to be so touchy about it," I pointed out, looking over his white head at a particularly disgusting painting on the wall. I couldn't even figure out what it was meant to be. Truthfully, from the angle I was looking from, it looked like something being strangled. Not even remotely soothing.

He huffed this time and gave an unnecessarily hard tug on my offending limb, making me wince.

I shut up.

Christopher had been pretty disapproving after I had broken Fred's nose and he had had some choice words to say about it too. Stupid, unnecessary, idiotic, irresponsible and rash were only a few of them. On reaching the hospital, Tasha had added considerably to the list.

"You think having your hand shattered like a bloody toy was worth it?" she had yelled. "What use was it to do this? What did you seek to accomplish?"

"I had told Fred he would be sorry for what he did to Meli," I explained easily, just as I had to Christopher. I held up my hand, industriously wrapped in one of Christopher's spare shirts from the boot of his car, and showed it to her. "I couldn't do anything else big short of murdering him, so I did what he had done to her. Hopefully," I shrugged, "he got the message."

I think my life would have been considerably at risk after this nonchalant attitude if Christopher hadn't pulled her back. I could understand where she was coming from. After breaking a leg and being a cripple for nigh on five years, it was quite natural for her to be apprehensive about any other of my limbs being even slightly misshapen. But I wasn't sorry. I would never be sorry. And I would never stop wishing I could have done more damage.

"There," Doctor Williams said briskly, pulling me away from my homicidal thoughts. "All done. You are free to go ahead and break some more of your body."

I looked at the white cast on my hand, my fingers feeling stiff and swollen inside its depths, and then at Charles. He looked so tired. There were deep bags under his eyes and a decided limpness to the corners of his lips that made me wonder how long he had been awake. Yet he hadn't sent someone else to look at me. He had come himself. Because, for some reason, he felt responsible for us. For the Rodwells and all else tied up, by default, to them and Angelica, his daughter.

I wondered if that's how he saw me now, if that's how he had seen Meli and all the other girls who came and went from his little apartment. I wondered if all his life he would keep trying to save other girls who resembled his daughter's memory, over and over and over again.