Part 4
“That won’t be the version he tells.”
Adrian looked out at the snow collecting along the curb.
“No,” he said. “It won’t.”
Thomas closed the door.
Luis drove them down the mountain beneath a sky emptied of stars. For several minutes, neither man spoke. The windshield wipers moved in a slow, steady rhythm.
“Did you know she would do that?” Luis asked at last.
Adrian watched the dark trees pass.
“No.”
“Did you think she might?”
“Yes.”
Luis made a quiet sound in his throat.
“What?”
“You pay me to drive.”
“I pay you to drive and tell me when I’m being an idiot.”
“No, your father pays me to drive. You separately encourage the second part.”
Adrian closed his eyes. “Go ahead.”
Luis took the next curve carefully.
“You stayed engaged to a woman you suspected might pull a blanket off you in public.”
“I didn’t suspect that specifically.”
“That distinction is doing a lot of work.”
Adrian opened his eyes.
Luis kept his attention on the road. He had worked for the Vale family for eleven years and had been in the front vehicle during the accident. He had pulled Adrian from the wreckage while gasoline ran beneath the engine and then spent months apologizing for not reaching him sooner, though the police report showed less than forty seconds had passed.
“You could have ended it privately,” Luis said.
“I tried.”
“You asked if she was happy. That’s not ending anything.”
“She said she was.”
“She also arranged an engagement dinner while you were hiding in a rehab cottage.”
“I wasn’t hiding.”
Luis glanced at him in the mirror.
Adrian sighed. “Fine.”
The cottage lights were on when they arrived. Dr. Naomi Reed’s rental car sat beside the entrance, already coated with snow.
“She’s here?” Adrian asked.
“You moved tomorrow’s session to tonight,” Luis said.
“I did not.”
“You texted her at seven thirteen.”
Adrian found his phone. The message was there.
Need to work after dinner. Late.
He remembered typing it while Celeste posed for photographs beside the atrium fireplace.
“That was optimistic,” he said.
“Another distinction doing work.”
Inside, the cottage smelled faintly of cedar, disinfectant, and the lentil soup the night nurse reheated every evening whether anyone wanted it or not. Naomi waited in the therapy room wearing gray athletic clothes and a Vale Meridian guest badge clipped upside down to her jacket.
She looked at the blanket across Adrian’s legs.
“That isn’t ours.”
“No.”
“How bad was dinner?”
Luis answered for him. “The fiancée removed it in front of the guests and told him he’d never run the company.”
Naomi looked at Adrian.
“Former fiancée,” he said.
“Did you stand?”
“No.”
“Did you try?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“I moved my foot.”
Her expression sharpened. “Intentionally?”
“Yes.”
“With control?”
“Yes.”
“Pain?”
“Seven.”
She closed her eyes for half a second.
“What?”
“You were told not to attempt resisted rotation outside therapy.”
“It wasn’t resisted.”
“You pressed against the footrest.”
“It was upholstered.”
Naomi stared at him until he looked away.
Luis removed his coat. “I’m going to find the soup.”
“You hate the soup,” Adrian said.
“I’d rather eat it than listen to this.”
When he left, Naomi sat on the padded bench beside Adrian.
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
Adrian did.
She listened without interruption, except once to ask how long he held the pressure and once to ask whether his knee moved. When he finished, she checked his leg for spasm, swelling, and heat. Her hands were warm and clinical.
“You may have strained the hip flexor.”
“I thought the signal was coming from the ankle.”
“Bodies don’t care what you think during dramatic moments.”
“It wasn’t dramatic until she noticed.”
Naomi looked at him. “You’ve been waiting for someone to notice.”
He said nothing.
She lowered his trouser cuff over the shoe.
“When were you planning to tell her?”
“When I could stand safely.”
“No. When were you planning to tell Celeste that you had regained voluntary movement?”
He turned toward the windows. The cottage’s reflection covered the darkness outside, giving him only his own face.
“I don’t know.”
“You knew she believed the prognosis was worse than it is.”
“The prognosis is still uncertain.”
“You knew she believed there had been no improvement.”
“She stopped asking.”
“And you stopped answering.”
Adrian rubbed his thumb over the wheel rim.
Naomi leaned back against the bench.
“I’m not defending what she did. It was ugly. But you don’t get to build a maze and then condemn someone for taking the wrong turn.”
“She didn’t take the wrong turn. She pulled a blanket off me.”
“Yes.”
“She told me I was useless.”
“Yes.”
“In front of my family.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her. “You’re agreeing with me in a very irritating way.”
“I’m preserving the possibility that two people behaved badly at the same dinner.”
A knock came from the doorway. Luis held two bowls of lentil soup.
“Three,” Naomi said.
“I assumed he was too angry to eat.”
“Bring three.”
Luis disappeared.
Adrian’s phone vibrated.
Twenty-seven unread messages.
Three from board members. Four from friends who had attended the dinner. Two from his mother. Six from Celeste. The rest came from numbers he recognized only vaguely or not at all.
At the top was a message from Malcolm Arden, Celeste’s father.
We will speak before you turn my daughter into a public spectacle.
Adrian showed it to Naomi.
She read it and handed back the phone.
“You already turned each other into one.”
The first video appeared online at 11:42 p.m.
It lasted eighteen seconds. The angle came from behind a gold centerpiece near the eastern windows. It showed Celeste standing over Adrian, the blanket falling, Mara kneeling, and Adrian’s shoe moving. His sentence could be heard clearly. The clip ended before Celeste demanded that he stand.
By midnight, it had been reposted more than eight thousand times.
May you like
At 12:16, Vale Meridian’s communications director called.
At 12:40, a gossip site identified Celeste and Adrian by name.
