I hadn’t noticed it, but I didn’t o

I hadn’t noticed it, but I didn’t open these drawers every day like he did. Shouldn’t he have noticed?
I wasn’t sure. But there was something wrong about this. The Xanax bothered me the most. This was the drug the police said Nicolas killed Aurora with. That he slipped it into her drink. Finding a bag here, in his house, didn’t seem good. Was it proof that Nicolas had done what they said? No. But it didn’t seem to scream innocence, either.
I didn’t know what to do.
“Oh, Dios mio!”
I quickly slipped the bag of Xanax under my hip as Constance came into the room, one of my insulin syringes in her hand.
“What is this?” she demanded.
“The drawer fell and this stuff was hidden under the bottom.”
“Oh, cojeme!”
“Constance!”
I couldn’t believe that word had come out of her mouth. I had never once, in all the years I’d known Constance—and I’d known her since I was a toddler—heard her swear. And that word…did she have to choose the worst swear word out there?
“This is not good,” she said, pressing a hand to her chest as though she was having pain there. “If the police find this—”
“The only way they could do that would be if one of us said something.”
“What are we supposed to do? We can’t just put it back.”
“Why not?”
Constance shot me a dark look. “Because we’d know it’s there.”
“By accident.”
“But we still know. You can’t put it back.”
“Then what do you suggest we do?”
Constance shook her head, her eyes moving almost wildly over the pile of drugs resting now in my lap. She stooped down and picked up the drawer and the false bottom I’d popped out. She studied them both like an answer might be written on them. There obviously wasn’t. She set them on the counter and began gathering the other items—the combs and tissues and over-the-counter pills—and tossed them back into the drawer, popping it into its space in the counter without the false bottom. The she grabbed a hand towel and gathered the baggies still resting on my lap. I pulled myself carefully to my feet, sliding the baggy of Xanax into the pocket of Nicolas’ bathrobe that I’d put on when I got out of the shower.
“What are you going to do with all of that?”
Constance carefully tied a knot into the towel to keep the baggies from slipping out. “I’m going to give it to Adam. He’ll know what to do with it.” She set the towel on the countertop and began opening drawers and searching through them. I stepped back as she moved around me to get to the drawers behind me.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure there isn’t any more.”
“Why would there be?”
Constance shot me that don’t-be-stupid look that was growing more and more familiar to me these days.
“You don’t think these are Nicolas’, do you?”
She didn’t answer and that was answer enough. I crossed my arms over my chest as I watched her. She must have felt my gaze because she said, “Give yourself that shot while you’re just standing there, doing nothing.”
Like a child who doesn’t know how to stand up to her mother, I grabbed the syringe she’d set on the corner of the sink and bared my hip, injecting the small amount of medication into the fatty area just behind my hip bone. It burned—I don’t know if it was something about the insulin or just my fear of needles, but it burned every time. I pressed the needle against the counter to bend it so no one would accidentally poke themselves and left it there.
I wasn’t going to help Constance search through Nicolas’ things. It seemed like a terrible violation of his privacy. I mean, it was only sticks of deodorant and extra toothpaste that Constance probably bought and deposited there herself, but it still felt like an intrusion. Instead, I grabbed the slacks and blouse I’d been wearing last night when Nicolas invited me into his room and slid them back on. I managed to get the bag of Xanax into my pocket just before Constance came into the room, that overburdened towel in her hands.
“Did you find anything else?”
“No,” she said, the word short and clipped. She clearly didn’t like being questioned.
“Have you ever found anything like that here before?” I asked, unable to resist.
“A few times.”
That got my attention.
“When?” I demanded.
Constance just shook her head. “I have to go call Adam. You should probably go wash your hands and put on some clean clothes.”
I jumped off the bed—as gracefully as my swollen belly would allow—and grabbed her shoulder before she could leave the room.
“When did you find drugs in here? When Aurora was here?”
“No, Ana.” She turned toward me, sadness in her eyes. “I know you like him.” Her eyes jumped to the bed behind me, to the sheets that were so disarranged that they told a story that I might have been ashamed of if it hadn’t been so good. “But there are things about him you don’t know. The sooner you have those babies and get out of this house, the better.”
“You used to talk about what a great man he was. You said he was the kindest person you’d ever worked for.”
“I did. And it was true, back then, before he married that woman.