***
I couldn’t remember how I ended up sitting in Dr. Sabine’s chair, a Styrofoam cup full of water balanced in my hand. I couldn’t remember how it ended up empty, my throat dry and tasting like tears.
Eve was seventeen years old when she died. KLS had struck her like a bolt of lightning when she was just nine, her episodes a violent dance between comatose and hysterical. The dreams started out as hallucinations, or so they thought, a cat named Blue who was invisible to everyone but Eve, the first sign of an oncoming episode.
It had been misdiagnosed as schizophrenia and they’d tried treating it with everything from electro-shock therapy to insulin shock therapy. The latter made her slip into a medically induced coma and it was thought that her periods of “unresponsiveness” were just a lingering side effect.
She died after an experimental treatment had induced an episode, one that had numbed her biological needs and left her to rot from the inside out. And that’s exactly what she did. Her body rejected all forms of nutrients and she starved to death. Because she couldn’t wake up. She died.
My mom finally arrived, face a stark patchwork of grief.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
But she just shook her head.
We all sat in Dr. Sabine’s office, everyone both waiting for me to break so they could pick up the pieces and waiting for me to tell them how I knew. I didn’t do either.
Dr. Banz was wilting in the corner, trying to keep his composure. “It was never my intention to be dishonest,” he finally said. “But I was. Because I’m a doctor but I was also her dad. Because this is personal to me. I’m so very—”
“I’ll go,” I stopped him.
“What?” My mom turned to me.
“To Germany.”
“Bryn…”
“I’ll do it.”
Chapter 27
Bryn
The Girl In Between (The Girl In Between Series Book 1) Page 37
