What Bianca Wouldn't Say
Chapter 03 - What Bianca Wouldn't Say
Edmund Bellamy survived the night, though the hospital's initial assessment painted a picture considerably more serious than a simple fall, a mild concussion from the impact with the marble floor, combined with a cardiac event the emergency room attributed to the physical shock and his own preexisting, previously undiagnosed heart condition.
He remained unconscious through the night and into the following morning, stable but not yet responsive, a specific limbo that left the entire family suspended in a state of exhausted, terrified waiting.
Adrian sat in the hospital waiting room for hours, still in his ruined tuxedo, replaying the ballroom over and over, the specific, sickening loop of watching his wife kick his father to the ground, of his own hand connecting with her cheek before he'd even fully decided to raise it.
He hadn't spoken to Bianca since the ambulance left. She'd gone home with her own attorney, a decision Adrian understood intellectually and still found himself furious about, the specific, tangled anger of a man who didn't yet understand what he was actually angry at.
"You need to eat something," his sister Claire said, settling into the chair beside him with two cups of vending machine coffee, her own face pale and drawn with exhaustion. "And you need to talk to me, Adrian. What actually happened tonight, before the part everyone saw."
"I don't know," Adrian admitted, staring at his own hands. "One second everything was normal. The next second Bianca kicked Dad across the ballroom in front of two hundred people, and I just, I reacted. I hit her, Claire. I've never hit anyone in my entire life, and I hit my own wife."
Claire's expression carried something Adrian couldn't quite read, a specific tension that seemed considerably more complicated than simple sisterly concern.
"Did you ask her why," Claire said carefully. "Before any of it happened. Did you ask her what was wrong."
"There wasn't time," Adrian said. "She just did it. Out of nowhere."
"Things rarely happen out of nowhere," Claire said, her voice unsteady now, something old and buried moving visibly behind her eyes. "Especially not things like that."
Adrian looked at his sister properly for the first time since arriving at the hospital, noticing, with a specific, dawning unease, exactly how carefully she was choosing her words.
"What do you know," he asked.
Claire's jaw tightened. She looked away, toward the hospital's fluorescent-lit hallway, toward anywhere that wasn't her brother's face.
"I need you to ask Bianca directly," she said finally. "Not me. This isn't mine to tell for her. I need you to actually ask her what happened before that ballroom, and I need you to listen completely, without deciding in advance what you already think the answer is."
"Claire," Adrian said, something cold settling in his stomach. "What are you not telling me."
Claire's eyes filled with tears, decades of careful, practiced silence visibly straining against something she'd clearly never expected to nearly say out loud tonight, of all nights.
May you like
"I love you," she said instead, standing abruptly. "I need to go check on Mom. Please, Adrian. Talk to your wife before you decide anything else about tonight."
She left him sitting alone in the waiting room, coffee going cold in his hands, a specific, unfamiliar dread building steadily in his chest, the growing, unwelcome sense that the story he'd assumed all evening might not be the actual story at all.
