Gideon stood beside the table watching her.
The bleeding from his ear had slowed, but sweat still shone along his forehead.
She pointed toward the chair.
“Sit.”
He did not understand the word, but he understood her hand.
He sat.
Rosalie
took the notebook.
I need to look again.
His eyes remained on the old receipt.
Finally he nodded.
She washed the tweezers once more, held the lamp close, and examined the damaged canal without touching the metallic edge.
The black creature in the bowl had stopped moving.
Rosalie studied it more carefully now.
It looked like some sort of fly larva, probably drawn into infected tissue during the warmer months.
Horrifying, certainly, but no creature could have lived inside Gideon for nearly three decades.
The parasite was recent.
The metal was not.
That realization was somehow worse.
She placed the tweezers down.
I won’t pull the metal.
Gideon’s shoulders relaxed slightly.
Why?
Too deep. I could make you bleed badly. We need a doctor.
His expression hardened at once.
He wrote:
No.
Rosalie expected the refusal.
Why?
He did not answer immediately.
Then:
Doctors made it worse.
Rosalie looked at
the scar behind his ear.
A nine-year-old boy.
A supposed projectile.
A surgery performed by her father.
Twenty-nine years of pain afterward.
She wrote carefully.
Tell me everything you remember.
Gideon leaned back.
For several moments he stared toward the fire.
