Dropping Like Spies - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Betrayal.  You don’t know it until you feel it and once you do, all you can do is envy your past self.  Because there’s something they don’t tell you about traitors.  You have to love them before you can ever hate them and when it comes time to hate them, you probably love them too much to let yourself do it.

So instead, you hate yourself.  You hate how you didn’t see it coming.  You hate that you ever trusted them to begin with.  But most of all, you hate the fact that you still love them, even though you know you shouldn’t.

“Push upwards against my hand as hard as you can.”

I did as Doctor Hughes said, holding my hand out in a fist and shoving it up into her palm.  The movement made my back burn.  “Push, Morgan,” she said again.

I looked up at her.  “I am pushing.”

It wasn’t a protest.  It was a fact, and that was the part that scared me.  If Doctor Hughes shared my concern, she didn’t let it show.  She just pulled up her clipboard and made her notes.  She did this a lot—saying nothing and writing everything.

This drove Dad crazy. “How’s she doing, Doc?”

Dad had become a continuous presence, looming over my shoulder with his arms crossed and an expression that dared anyone to step within a five-foot radius of his daughter.  Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to mind.  It was nice to have someone watching my back all the time. 

Doctor Hughes took a moment before answering him, which I knew could only bring bad news.  I braced myself, feeling the muscles in my shoulder moan.  Two surgeries down, three to go.  “You’ll recover,” she said, finally.  “I expect you to regain full use of your arm, but there will be permanent complications.”

Yeah.  Permanent complications.  No kidding.

“What kind of complications?” Dad asked for me.

Doctor Hughes looked right at me as she answered.  “Stiffness, mostly,” she said.  “It will happen a lot at first.  It will probably lock up during exercises and, as you know, when you wake up it will feel sore.”  I did know.  It sometimes took hours for me to move my arm in the morning.  I had to eat breakfast with my right hand, which only resulted in shaky spoons, milky pajamas, and far less cereal in my stomach than originally anticipated.  “Eventually your muscles will heal again and the effects of the cut will fade, but that will take a very long time.  Years.  Decades, even.”

Doctor Alex tucked her clipboard under her arm.  Dad nodded like it was exactly what he expected to hear.  I don’t remember what I did.  Probably nothing.  I did a lot of that in the days following the death of William Kidd.

“Do you have any additional questions while we’re here?” she asked.  Dad shook his head, but she wasn’t looking at him.  She made it very clear that she was talking to me when she asked, “Morgan?”

Questions?  Yeah.  I had a lot of questions.  Like when had it all gotten so hard or how long my friend had been planning on stabbing me in the back.  I wanted to know why Will hadn’t talked to anyone and who had told him that he wasn’t supposed to.  I wanted to know who had done this to him, I wanted to know why, and I wanted to know why he had let himself fall into that trap.

Questions weren’t the problem.  The problem was getting answers.

“Morgan?”  I looked up from the grey speckles tile, met with those big brown eyes and dark hair that bounced.  Will had loved it when Doctor Hughes’ hair bounced.  “If you have any questions, now is the time to ask.”

And so I asked the only one that I knew a doctor could answer.  “Can someone my age have heart attacks?”

Dad shifted and I knew that I had somehow caught him off guard.  That he thought his daughter’s heart attacks were something that he should probably know.  That he was wondering how many other things he had forgotten to notice over the past few months.