By the time she got back to Vince’s house she was shaking. Life—or in her case death—as she knew it was over. Holly couldn’t believe it. What had she done?
She’d never punched anyone in her life, but the way she had been feeling toward Todd had just been impossible to get out in any other way.
She’d ruined everything.
Was it really only a couple of hours ago that Dr. Hill had been telling her how much progress she’d been making and how she had a good chance of the manual purge actually working. She’d gone and blown it in one foul swoop by showing that her issues were as unresolved as ever.
Holly wasn’t quite sure which point had triggered her to hit Todd. Was it that he had been cheating on her? Or that he thought that she’d killed herself?
And worse, she’d inadvertently dragged Vince into it by making him look like the bad guy.
To the outside world, Vince was just a normal computer geek, but the reality was that he was a really nice guy who worked hard, kept out of trouble and still found the time to help self-absorbed dead girls sort out their issues. And now she’d just ensured that he might lose his job as well.
Nice going, Holly Evans.
In a way it wasn’t so bad that she was going to lose her memory. The more she thought about it, the less she liked a lot of what her life had been like. Well, Todd was certainly a let down of epic proportions.
To think that his ambition and determination had been one of the things she’d loved most about him, but if Amy was right and Todd was with Rochelle because he thought it would be good for his career, then it didn’t really say much about him at all, did it?
Then there was work itself. Up until now Holly hadn’t even questioned the rather heavy handed corporate environment she’d been part of, but stepping back and dying certainly had a way of giving a girl some perspective.
On top of that it seemed she had misjudged most everyone round her. Well, her stepmother and Vince Murphy for a start.
If anyone was the loser around here, it was her—Holly Evans. Stupid idiot who couldn’t even die right.
She had been such a fool.
Once inside the safety of Vince’s room, she took his boots off as the full horror of what had happened played out around her like a multi-color plasma screen in her head.
As she had left The Pool Palace she was aware of Gemma’s look of horror, Amy’s fury and Rochelle’s annoyance that some of Todd’s blood had squirted onto her skin tight jeans.
She shrugged the black leather jacket off and threw it onto the nearby chair. However she missed and the jacket landed with a thump on the floor.
Man, she thought as she wriggled off the bed to pick it up. It seemed she couldn’t do anything right these days. She was just about to lie back down when she caught sight of the bottle of tablets she’d found in his satchel.
She’d almost forgotten about them. She retrieved them from the ground and turned them around in her hand.
So what were beta-blockers?
She supposed she could go look it up on the Internet but she wasn’t quite sure she would be able to work his state of the art laptop.
“Wake up, Vince, I want to talk to you,” she said out loud, but there was nothing.
She got up and headed over to the desk in the corner. It was of no consequence that tomorrow she would have forgotten all of this. Tonight she not only wanted to take her mind off her own problems but she wanted to know what was wrong with Vince Murphy.
There was nothing else in there apart from some neatly organized stationery and an alarm clock so she turned her attention to the closet and decided it warranted further investigation.
She stood on a chair and peered in. There was a pile of plain white T-shirts and next to them was a pile of black T-shirts. Vince had the fashion sense of Simon Cowell. Holly pushed them aside and thrust her hand towards the back. Bingo.
Her fingers clutched around a large cardboard folder, which she dragged out and raced back to the bed to study.
At first not a lot of it made sense. It was obviously medical information in the form of graphs. There were piles of them and Holly frowned as she turned over page after page. It looked serious.
Vince. What’s wrong with you?
She kept paging through until she finally came across a photocopy from a textbook, which meant that she might be vaguely able to understand it.
Long QT Syndrome.
What on earth was that? Holly scanned the text (helpfully highlighted with a pink marker), which explained that it was some sort of wonky heart rhythm thing. She flicked back through the other files. The strange graphs seemed to date back to at least five years. So Vince Murphy had known about this Long QT thing since he was seventeen.
Then she turned back to the article. It could cause fainting, prevent you from playing sports, and in some instances Long QT Syndrome could cause sudden death.
The purple lights.
Holly’s throat tightened as a sickening sensation lodged in her stomach. She shut her eyes but all she could see was the small bright lights that had been dancing around Vince’s head like fireflies on the day of her funeral. What if Dr. Hill hadn’t made a mistake after all? What if instead of fainting, Vince had been dying. Or nearly dying, and for whatever reason he had lived through it? Perhaps the shock of her landing in his body had jump-started his heart back into life?
If Vince had nearly died, then why didn’t he say something? Anything?
Why did he let her rant on and on about her problems as if he didn’t have a care in the world?
He must have been so surprised when he’d come around from his near death experience to find that she was in his body, but did he complain? Well, okay, so perhaps he wasn’t exactly a saint in the complaining department, but overall he had been pretty amazing.
“Vince. Did you really walk around for the last five years knowing you might die at any time? How did you manage to keep this big, terrible thing that was happening to you, a secret from everyone?”
Again there was no answer but Holly didn’t really mind as she stared at the ceiling in the darkened room. From outside the window she could hear the distant wail of an ambulance but she ignored it.
Holly felt a chill go through her body and she shivered. “You know, Vince,” she said in a hoarse voice. “You’re not the only one who has a secret.”
She lifted up her arms and stared at the smooth skin of his wrist. “You’re so much braver than me. You wear your secrets on the inside, but I was too chicken to do that. If you could see my real arm, you would know what I mean. There are still faint scars from where I cut myself.”
Holly could feel the tears trickling down the side of her face as she sat still on the bed. “The ones down on my wrist are the worst. Apparently if my stepmother hadn’t found me when she did, I would’ve been dead in an hour. I wonder how she felt having to see me like that? So soon after my dad had died.”
An almost hysterical sob escaped from her lips. “I was off for over a week and I know everyone was talking about it; about who would be so stupid as to let the razor slip and almost kill themselves?
“But you see, all the whispers were true. It wasn’t an accident.” Holly felt strangely calm as she spoke. “I told them all it was, but it wasn’t. That night I just didn’t see the point of living without my dad. So I did it. It was easy you know—t e actual cutting—and for a minute I was happy, but then I got to the hospital and I saw him. My dad.”
She started to laugh as she tucked her legs in front of her and wrapped her arms around them. “It’s not really funny, is it? But the thing is now I’m dead I know how hard it was for him to visit me. Story of my life really—finding things out too late.”
Suddenly Holly stopped laughing. “But he couldn’t hide it, Vince. He couldn’t hide how disappointed he was in me. You see he had died after a long, painful battle with cancer and he had fought it every step of the way. He was so brave and dignified. And what did I do? Get a razor and let the life seep out of me with two easy strokes. That’s why, when I survived, I was too embarrassed to tell the truth. Plus, I was grateful to be given another chance. To prove to my dad I wasn’t a quitter.”
Holly realized her eyes were shut and she opened them up and looked around the room in shock. “That’s why I wanted to see him so bad up in heaven. To tell him it was an accident and that for the last six years I’ve worked my butt off. I guess that’s not going happen.” Holly sniffed. “I don’t even know why I’ve told you…well, not that you’re here, but I’m pretending you are. Actually, that’s another thing I’ve discovered about you, Vincent Ryan Murphy. You’re a great listener.”
“Thanks,” Vince said in his trademark drawl, which caused Holly to fall off the bed in shock.
Unbelievable.