No One Knows Us Here(31)

Alejandro beckoned me to follow him down the hall, and then we entered one of the offices. The door was labeled RIVERCROSS WELLNESS CLINIC. Only one other person was there, a middle-aged woman sitting in the corner. She was reading Sunset magazine. It was quiet in here, eerily quiet. The only sound was coming from a large fish tank, an electric hum and the gurgling of bubbles.

“Just a quick checkup.” Alejandro sounded a little embarrassed when he said it, like he knew it was weird but was trying his best to act like it wasn’t.

“A checkup?” I bugged my eyes out at Alejandro. “Like a physical?”

“Leo just—” Alejandro looked like he was struggling to come up with the right words for this. “You’ve just got to go along with this, Rosemary, okay? This is it.”

I laughed. “I don’t have to go along with anything.”

“You do if you want this job.”

“Well, maybe I don’t.” I stood before him, my hands on my hips. I wondered, then, what Alejandro knew about The Project.

“If you want to back out, Rosemary, now’s the time to do it,” Alejandro said to me. “Just return that deposit we made into your bank account. No harm, no foul. You can just walk away.”

I thought of the apartment. I thought of all the furniture I ordered the very day I moved in. I ordered it all in a rush, thinking of Wendy walking into that apartment with the huge double-hung windows, the new velvet couch, the side tables. The wool rugs, the brand-new bed, the dining set with the chairs and buffet. Her eyes would light up, and she would smile and twirl around the way I had twirled around when I first saw the place and knew I had to live there. I had to do whatever it took to make it happen.

“Okay,” I said after a beat or two, and Alejandro visibly relaxed. He may have even smiled at me, almost. “Let’s get this over with.”

He told me to check in at the front desk. He would wait for me out here. For that I was grateful. It could have been worse. Alejandro could have escorted me into the exam room and watched the whole thing, dictating notes into his Mirror for Leo.

After about ten minutes, a nurse called my name. She was wearing magenta scrubs and a coordinating head wrap in a bright tropical pattern.

“Good luck,” Alejandro said to me as I stood up. I just shook my head at him.

It seemed like any normal doctor’s appointment. Maybe that’s all this was, I thought. Just some regular checkup. Maybe Leo liked to make sure all his employees are nice and healthy. Maybe this was a perk of the job. Yeah. That’s what I tried to tell myself. The nurse jotted down my height and weight, took my blood pressure. All the usual stuff. She was very friendly. She led me to an examination room and told me to change into a hospital gown with the opening at the front. She said she’d be back in a few minutes.

I sat on the end of the exam table, waiting. The walls of the room were painted dusty rose. Along the ceiling was one of those wallpaper runners in a rose pattern. It was all very eighties.

The nurse came back in, shutting the door behind her. She looked over the form I’d filled out in the waiting room. “So, it looks like you have some family history of breast cancer?”

“My mom’s mom,” I said.

She tapped that answer into the computer. “How’s she doing now?”

“She died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Any other members of your family with a history of breast cancer?”

“No.”

“Your mom, she’s doing fine?”

“She’s dead, too. But she didn’t have breast cancer. She was killed in a car accident.”

She didn’t say she was sorry to hear that, but she did look sorry. She opened her eyes wide at me and shook her head sadly before turning back to her computer and typing into it.

“How many sexual partners in the last year?”

I hesitated before answering. I wondered how much of this was going into a report Leo was going to read. I wondered what the right answer was. Maybe I could say thirty, and Leo would think that number was too high. Maybe he’d let me go, and I could keep the $6,000.

“Two,” I answered. Steele and Sam, I figured. They were the only ones worth mentioning, anyway.

She raised her eyebrows slightly, as if she doubted that answer very much, and then she dutifully plugged the number into her computer. She asked a few more questions and then instructed me to wait for the doctor.

I waited, swinging my feet, debating whether to put my socks back on. My feet were freezing. I should paint my toenails, I mused. I hadn’t done anything to them since right before that ill-fated date with Sebastian St. James. I’d gotten a professional pedicure, just for him. What a waste.

I must have been sitting there for fifteen minutes before hearing a soft knock on the door. I sat up straight and tightened the hospital gown around me.

The doctor was a man. He looked young, for a doctor. Maybe he was one of Leo’s buddies. I could see that. Some childhood friend, maybe. Some bro from college. He had a lot of hair—thick, brown hair that cascaded out of his head and flowed back in waves. It was probably his pride and joy. I could picture him taking a comb out of the back pocket of too-tight jeans and smoothing back the strands, admiring himself in the mirror.

The moment I saw him, I knew I couldn’t go through with this. A chill ran through my whole body. At the same time, my pulse quickened. I swallowed and tried to take in a deep breath to control myself. Instead I just sucked in the air wrong. I felt like I was going to choke on my own spit. I curled into myself, coughed into the crook of my arm.