Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 103918 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103918 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Lex dropped his eyes again and I felt the loss more than I wanted to admit. “I lost my phone outside when I was trying to get the generator started. Even if I could have found a landline inside the cabin, I wouldn’t have known the number to call. I was so cold and tired that I decided to just lie down and wait for the power to come back on.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him how he’d gone from that to overdosing on his insulin and then trying to undo what he’d done, but then I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to care. The silence between us grew awkward fast, so I returned all of his supplies to his kit and set it on the nightstand. As soon as I did, though, I couldn’t stop staring at the damn thing. “Try to finish your sandwich,” I murmured as I stood. “Call out if you need anything,” I added, though my eyes were still on Lex’s little black bag.
Lex didn’t say anything and he didn’t move, making the silence in the room even more pronounced. I climbed to my feet and turned to leave the room. In the process, I snagged the bag as discreetly as I could, hoping like hell that Lex hadn’t heard the rustling of the material as I did so. The whole thing felt wrong somehow, like I was deceiving him or something. But I took the bag anyway and left the room.
I figured if Lex really wanted to end his life, he’d figure out some way to do it, but he sure as shit wasn’t going to do it while on my watch.
Chapter Five
Lex
He'd taken the bag with him.
I knew that only because the bag made a crinkling sound every time it moved. With the silence that had surrounded Gideon and me, I'd been able to hear a lot more than usual. That crinkle had been there when he’d been sorting through my bag and then I'd heard it again as he’d placed it near me, presumably on a nightstand or table by the bed. There had been a beat of silence and then the crinkling had begun all over again.
I felt sick to my stomach as I reached out to search for the bag. I really wanted to be wrong about the whole thing. But when my fingers didn't come into contact with the distinctive material, I felt my stomach drop out.
"What did you expect?" I murmured to myself.
I put my hand out again to look for the sandwich that I’d put down earlier. I had absolutely no appetite, but I knew that I needed to get my blood sugar up. I'd been honest with Gideon when I’d told him that I'd known I'd made a terrible mistake when I'd injected myself with an entire cartridge of insulin. The second the distinctive click had registered in my brain I'd wanted to undo it. I'd downed two granola bars that I'd had in my bag as quickly as I could, but it hadn't been enough. The insulin had worked quickly and by the time I'd realized the food hadn't counteracted the medicine, it had been too late. I’d started to feel the telltale signs of a hypoglycemic event, but I'd been helpless to do anything about it.
I tried not to think about what would've happened if Gideon hadn't shown up when he had. The fact was that I owed the man my life.
The sandwich tasted like sawdust as I forced it down. I drank at least half of the water bottle and then just sat on the side of the bed with the weight of the food feeling like lead in my belly. There was a warm, furry body pressed against my leg, so I reached out my hand. Brewer automatically licked it and I found myself smiling. I'd never been around dogs much, so just feeling the animal’s soft fur was a strange kind of treat for me.
When I’d learned years earlier that my condition was irreversible and I’d slowly started to lose my sight, I'd refused any efforts by my doctors to get me into therapy so I could start to both mentally and physically prepare myself for what was to come. Even when the spots had started to appear, followed by increasingly blurrier and blurrier moments, I still hadn't accepted the inevitable. Many of the doctors had reminded me that I had other senses I could rely on, along with advances in technology, to live a relatively normal life, but I’d ignored them. The fact was that they hadn't understood that losing my sight wasn't just changing my life, it was ending it.
I sighed and gave Brewer a couple more pats and then settled back down on the bed. My mind drifted to a place it probably shouldn't have been going.