Chapter 1 - She Knew Where to Hurt Me
Linda Whitmore tore the blanket from my body before I understood how she had entered the room.
“You ruined my daughter’s wedding, you useless leech—stop faking and get up!”
Her palm came down directly over the fresh bandage on the lower-right side of my abdomen.
Pain ripped through me. I screamed and folded around the incision, one hand gripping the bedrail while the heart monitor broke into rapid beeps.
“Please,” I gasped. “I just had surgery.”
Less than four hours earlier, surgeons at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus had removed my ruptured appendix and cleaned an infection that had already begun spreading through my abdomen. I had woken with a drain beneath the bandage, an IV in my wrist, and barely enough strength to lift my head.
Linda raised her hand again.
Daniel charged through the open doorway and caught her wrist.
“Touch my wife again and you’re dead to me!”
He shoved his mother away from the bed. Two nurses rushed in. One moved between Linda and Daniel while the other examined the bandage beneath my gown.
Linda stumbled backward in her pearl-trimmed pink suit, the same outfit she had worn to Natalie’s wedding. Her makeup was still perfect except for a dark streak beneath one eye.
“She should’ve died before dragging my son away from his sister’s wedding!” she shouted.
Daniel stared at her as though he no longer recognized the woman who had raised him.
The nurse pressed gauze around my incision. When I cried out, Linda watched her hands closely.
Then she smiled.
“Funny how I knew exactly where to hit.”
One nurse slowly turned toward her.
Daniel’s grip loosened around Linda’s wrist.
I looked from him to the open doorway and understood something that frightened me more than the attack.
Linda had known my room number.
May you like
She had known where the surgeons had cut me.
And someone had allowed her upstairs.
