Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Troy stared at him.
“Nothing’s going on between us,” he said impatiently, the words almost a reflex, the same denial he’d have given a reporter or a rumor or a man in a bar who’d looked too long.
“You and Camilla have been seeing each other behind my back—”
“We spend time together,” Troy snapped, and the calm he’d been holding cracked clean down the middle, because of all the rotten, backwards, upside-down things this disaster of a night had produced, this was somehow the one that lit him up, “because I practically raised her. She’s like a baby sister to me.”
The words rang down the quiet corridor and hung there.
Flint didn’t answer, but Troy could see, in the set of the man’s shoulders, in the careful blankness that came down over his face like a shutter, that the other man was still unwilling to accept his words as truth. Two months of believing a thing did not come undone in a hospital hallway in the space of a sentence, however true the sentence was, and Troy understood that, even as it made him want to take the man by the lapels and shake the wrongness out of him.
So he tried the only currency he had ever fully trusted.
“I’m known to be many things,” Troy said, “but never a liar. You know that. The whole city knows that. You should’ve remembered that before you started building whatever it is you’ve built.” He watched Flint’s face. “Unless…”
He saw it happen. He saw the exact moment the word unless went into Camilla’s husband like a key into a lock the man hadn’t known was there, saw the cold intelligence that had made Flint dangerous finally turn and point itself in the right direction. Flint had stiffened.
“Someone deliberately fed you lies about Camilla and me.”
A muscle started ticking in the other man’s jaw. Troy watched him run it back, whatever it was, the photographs or the whispers or the helpful voice at his ear, watched him hold it up against the new light and see, for the first time, the seams. And then Flint said one name, quietly, and it had everything in the last two months making its slow, traitorous, sickening sense.
“Raymond.”
Troy felt his own stomach drop, because the name fit. The name fit like the last piece of something he’d been turning over in his hands for weeks without knowing what it was.
“That son of a—”
“You read my mind,” Flint said.
“I’ve been hearing rumors.” Troy kept his voice curt, because the alternative was to say what he was actually feeling, which was the cold dawning fury of a man realizing his baby sister had been collapsed on a ballroom floor as the end product of another man’s spreadsheet. “He’s got gambling problems. Bad ones, the kind that don’t stay quiet. And word is he might’ve convinced someone he has what it takes to remove you out of the picture before selling the team—”
“Is there a next of kin here for Camilla Flint?”
Both men turned. The doctor had come out through the double doors, a chart in hand and reading glasses pushed up into her hair, looking between the two of them with the particular weariness of someone who’d done a hundred of these conversations at one in the morning.
Both men answered yes at the same time, and Troy grimaced.
“He’s the husband,” he said. “I’m the big brother.”
Flint shot him a look at that, something quick and unreadable. Troy ignored it.
The doctor decided, sensibly, not to wade into whatever that was. “She’s conscious now,” she said, and Troy felt the whole night let go of his shoulders an inch, “but we’ll keep her confined for a couple of days to run some tests. Her rhythm’s behaving for the moment and I want to keep it that way.” She looked at them both, and then, deliberately, she looked at the husband. “And again. Don’t cause her any kind of trouble. No fights, no scenes, no bad news she doesn’t need tonight. Or next time, she won’t just lose consciousness.” A beat, to be sure it had gone in. “She’ll pass away for good.”
She let that sit, then turned and went back through the doors, and the corridor was quiet again, and the two men stood in it with the warning between them like a third person.
When the doctor was gone, Troy looked at Camilla’s husband for a long moment, taking the full read of him, the gray face and the loosened tie and the eyes that hadn’t left the doors she’d disappeared behind. Then, grimly, he gave the man the thing it nearly killed him to give.
“Go on. Check on her.”
Silence.
Then Flint said, quietly, in a voice that had finally come all the way back from wherever it had gone, “Thank you.”
Troy watched the other man walk away down the hushed and carpeted corridor toward the room where his wife lay learning how to trust her own heartbeat again, and he let him go, because it was the least he could do, and because some small unwilling part of him had begun, against all the evidence of the last two months, to hope.