Page 103 of Hard to Kill

“I think I just saw somebody I know. Two somebodies, actually. Or nobodies, depending on your point of view.”

I tell her who they are and why it matters to me that they are here together.

“Be right back,” I say, and get up from the table.

I’ve only taken a couple of steps toward them when the main dining room at the Bell & Anchor begins to spin.

I take one more step, and then stop, unable to do anything now except wait for the world to stop spinning.

Something it refuses to do.

I take a small step to the side, all weight on my right foot, as a way of trying to steady myself, remembering times in the gym when the trainer would make me balance on one foot for thirty seconds.

I bump into a waiter then.

Someone grabs for my arm.

Too late.

I’m falling.

I hear a woman scream.

Last thing I remember.

EIGHTY-ONE

“AT LEAST I DIDN’T consider kicking you to wake you up,” Dr. Sam Wylie says.

It’s an hour later and I’m hooked up to an IV in a bed in a private room at Southampton Hospital that Sam Wylie has scored for me, mostly because she’s not someone to be screwed with, especially not here.

She drove me herself, not wanting to wait for an ambulance. I admitted to her over a couple of bottles of water that for all my chatter about doing the right things, over the past couple of days I’ve allowed myself to get dehydrated. She tells me it’s probably not the only reason I fainted. But likely the biggest one.

I accuse her of being overly dramatic.

“Ending up in the hospital at the end of our girls’ night out is what’s kind of dramatic,” Sam says.

She’s in a chair next to my bed.

“You’ve got to sleep more, you’ve got to exercise more, you have to hydrate every day and not just when you remember,” she says. “All those good things you say you’ve been doing? You don’t get to take a day off, whether you’re doing chemo or not.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder. Or you not only won’t make it through your trial, you won’t make ittoyour trial.”

I lift my head slightly and start to speak.

Sam doesn’t give me the chance.

“Hush and listen,” she says, putting a little snap in her voice. “I’m telling you for the last time that no trial and no client is worth dying for.”

“Would you say that if I were defending one of your patients?” I ask.

“We’re talking here about the most important patient I’ve ever had,” she says.“You.”

“I tried to quit the case. I just couldn’t make myself do it.”

Sam smiles. “Would that have killed you?”