“They said you were lost in your sadness,” she whispered. “That you were already fading. That all they had to do was keep you ‘just sick enough’ and people would accept anything they said about you. That if you got worse, everyone would believe it was because you couldn’t recover from losing me.”
There it was again—that phrase that had followed me for months—“lost in grief,” “not himself,” “not thinking clearly.”
I thought of the way I stumbled sometimes going up the stairs. The mornings when the light hurt my eyes so much I had to stay in bed. The days that slipped away in fog, when I couldn’t remember if I had eaten, showered, spoken to anyone. The nights my heart raced for no reason and then dropped into a slow, heavy thud that made it hard to breathe.
“They’re giving you too much,” Chloe said, her voice shaking. “Too much tea. Too many pills. They said you trusted them. They joked that the more you trusted them, the easier it would be to ‘take over everything’ when people finally accepted that you were too fragile to run the company.”
The herbal blend Vanessa stirred for me every night. The small white tablets Colby pressed into my palm in the morning.
“For your nerves.”