I lay alone with the strange roaring and hissing sound getting louder and closer.
It made no sense.
Nothing did.
It was as if the wiring in my head had all shorted. None of my thoughts would quite connect.
Closing my eyes against the stabbing sensation in the back of my skull, I was grateful for the soft towel underneath me.
I felt groggy. Sluggish.
You fell, I reminded myself.
Then I opened my eyes as I remembered something else.
Donovan had been behind me. Immediately behind me. And—
The pain flared again.
I lay there helpless in the roaring, hissing confusion.
Until a new sound reached me.
A dim chime.
Two notes.
The doorbell.
I struggled to focus as I thought about how Donovan had reacted before. He’d been standing over me. I’d seen him looking behind him with his body tensed because he’d heard something.
Could it have been the doorbell?
I levered myself up very slightly on my elbow.
The room slanted and dipped but this time the pain in my head wasn’t quite as bad as before. The faint whistling in my ears began to subside.
Twisting onto my side, I stared down at the white towel underneath me, my vision gradually sliding back into focus.
There were a few spots of blood on it.
My heart clenched as I reached up with trembling fingers and touched the back of my head, feeling a patch of sticky dampness amid my hair.
A sudden judder passed through the floorboards beneath me. A familiar tremor.
He’s opened the front door.
I strained to hear what was happening. It was difficult to make anything out over the roaring, hissing sound in the room, but I thought I could hear muffled voices.
They sounded low and conversational, modulated and polite.
I couldn’t tell what was being said.
What was that hissing noise anyway?
I turned as carefully as I could.
Steam.
It was billowing out from the shower cubicle, curling against the ceiling, spilling across the floor in misted clouds.
The shower was running.
Why was the shower running?
Lifting the towel, I pressed it to the back of my head.
‘Ow, fuck!’
Getting to my knees, I reached above me for the sink my head must have struck – there was a faint smear of blood on it – and pulled myself up to peer into the mirror.
Steam had condensed on the glass but I could see a hazed outline of myself. My hair was tangled and in disarray. My eyes looked wet and dazed. But at least I didn’t feel as if I was going to pass out again.
A fresh cloud of steam wafted past me and I squinted at the reflection of the shower cubicle to my left. Donovan must have been letting the water heat up. He must have been planning to soak a towel, clean my wound. Then the doorbell had rung and he’d gone to answer it.
Had he called for an ambulance?
I looked around for my phone, realizing that I could check the doorbell app, see who was down there and—
That’s when it came back to me.
Bethany.
I’d been searching for Bethany.
Where was she?