Chương 5
“You could have waited.”
Malcolm put the bag on the chair.
“You’re right.”
Leah looked at him suspiciously.
“I said you’re right.”
“I heard you. I’m checking for fever.”
“Your sense of humor has deteriorated.”
“It married badly.”
The words surprised both of them.
Leah’s mouth closed.
Malcolm’s expression changed.
He sat down.
“Was he always cruel?”
“No.”
“You don’t have to protect him.”
“I’m not.”
She pulled the blanket higher.
“He could be funny. Really funny. He remembered stupid things. My coffee order. The name of the teacher I hated in seventh grade. He used to put gas in my car because I always waited until the warning light came on.”
Malcolm listened.
“He made me feel normal.”
The word hurt him more than anything she had said about Grant.
“What did I make you feel?”
Leah looked at him.
“Observed.”
He absorbed it without defense.
That was new.
She continued.
“Grant liked that I knew expensive restaurants but hated talking about money. He liked that I had opinions about office chairs and no idea what our wine cost. For a while I thought that meant he liked me.”
“And later?”
“Later I started wondering whether he had been studying me.”
Malcolm rubbed his thumb over one knuckle.
“Why didn’t you leave after the first time he hit you?”
Leah stared at the window.
The question was gentle.
That almost made it worse.
“Because he cried.”
Malcolm said nothing.
“He sat on our kitchen floor and cried. He didn’t blame me. He didn’t say I caused it. He said something was wrong with him. He said he’d get help.”
“Did he?”
“For a while.”
“And the second time?”
“He didn’t cry.”
She swallowed.
“He apologized the next day.”
“The third?”
“I don’t want to do this.”
“Okay.”
That answer startled her.
Malcolm looked at the floor.
After a moment he said, “You don’t owe me the whole story because I showed up for the worst five minutes.”
Leah’s eyes filled.
She turned her face toward the window before anything could fall.
Two days later she left the hospital in flat shoes Marta had packed because the cream heels from the hotel were being held with the rest of her belongings.
Malcolm wanted her in his apartment.
Leah refused.
He wanted her in a hotel under another name.
She refused that too.
She went instead to the apartment of her friend Nina, a pediatric dentist in Brooklyn who swore when she was frightened and owned a couch so uncomfortable that no adult had ever mistaken it for hospitality.
Nina opened the door, took one look at Leah, and said, “I’m going to murder him.”
Leah stepped inside.
“No, you’re not.”
“I’m a dentist. I know where nerves are.”
“Nina.”
“Fine. I’ll imagine it quietly.”
Malcolm stood behind Leah with two bags.
Nina looked up at him.
She had met him once, six years earlier, and had spent the entire dinner calling him Mr. Mercer because she knew it annoyed him.
“Mr. Mercer.”
“Nina.”
“You can put the bags there.”
“I can carry them to the bedroom.”
“I know. But you can put them there.”
Malcolm glanced at Leah.
She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.
He set the bags down.
Nina folded her arms.
“You staying?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Leah said, “Nina.”
“What? You need soup and sleep, not a board meeting.”
Malcolm looked at his daughter.
“You have your phone?”
“The replacement.”
“Owen’s downstairs.”
“I don’t need Owen downstairs.”
“He isn’t staying.”
Leah stared.
Malcolm added, “Unless you ask.”
She waited for the hidden clause.
There wasn’t one.
“Okay.”
He moved toward the door.
“Dad.”
He turned.
She looked at him.
“Thank you for coming.”
Something passed through his face so fast Nina pretended not to see it.
Malcolm nodded.
Then he left.
Nina locked the door behind him.
“He’s terrifying.”
“He practices.”
“Is he always that sad?”
Leah looked at the door.
“No.”
That night, Leah woke at 2:13 with her heart racing because a delivery truck had dropped something metal in the street below.
Nina appeared in the bedroom doorway wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon molar on it.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Want water?”
“No.”
“Want me to stay?”
Leah hesitated.
“Maybe.”
Nina climbed onto the bed without comment.
For twenty minutes neither woman spoke.
Then Nina said, “You know my mother thinks your father is handsome.”
Leah turned her head.
“What?”
“She saw him at my birthday dinner years ago.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I panicked.”
Leah started laughing.
Her ribs hurt.
She put both hands over them and laughed anyway, half crying by the end.
Nina stared at the ceiling.
“I stand by the distraction.”
On Monday morning, Mercer Lodging Group’s board held an emergency call.
Malcolm’s attorneys advised him not to attend.
He attended.
Victor Shaw, the company’s general counsel for twenty-two years, joined from his office downtown. He was sixty-one, silver-haired, measured, and so familiar to Malcolm that he had attended Leah’s high-school graduation without needing an invitation.
Victor had been there when Malcolm’s wife died.
He had stood in Malcolm’s kitchen afterward, washing coffee cups while relatives whispered in other rooms because neither man knew what else to do with his hands.
Now Victor appeared on a laptop screen wearing a navy tie and the expression he used for manageable catastrophes.
“The immediate problem,” he said, “is that Grant filed first.”
Malcolm leaned back.
“The immediate problem is my daughter was assaulted.”
“I understand that.”
“No. You understand liability.”
Victor paused.
Several directors looked away from their screens.
Victor said, “Right now those things overlap.”
Malcolm hated him slightly for being correct.
The hotel had preserved the corridor footage. Grant’s attorney had also demanded it.
Victor recommended they avoid public statements and make no accusation they could not prove.
“So we say nothing,” Malcolm said.
“For now.”
“And Grant gets to describe Leah as drunk.”
May you like
“We challenge that through counsel.”
“He gets to say I forced entry.”
