Chương 2
Until now.
“I believe you,” he said.
Sophie’s eyes closed.
Vanessa spoke from across the room.
“She was already acting strange when I arrived.”
Nathan turned.
Vanessa had moved her handbag farther from herself. A deliberate gesture. A small demonstration of cooperation.
“How long have you been here?”
“Maybe twenty minutes.”
Sophie’s eyes opened.
“No.”
Vanessa looked at her.
Sophie’s lips moved before sound came.
“You were here when I got home.”
Vanessa shook her head. “Soph, you’re not thinking clearly.”
“Don’t call me that.”
The words were weak, but something in Vanessa’s face tightened.
Nathan watched both women.
“When did you get home?” he asked Sophie.
She seemed to search for the answer.
“Three… thirty?”
It was almost four.
Nathan looked at Vanessa.
“You said you got here twenty minutes ago.”
“I did.”
“She says you were here first.”
“She also says I changed her medication.”
Nathan held up the phone.
Vanessa’s gaze dropped to it.
“That clip is not what you think.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
“I will.”
“Now.”
Vanessa’s eyes moved toward Sophie.
Nathan saw the calculation.
He stepped slightly to the side, blocking the line between them.
Vanessa noticed that, too.
Her shoulders lowered.
“This is insane,” she said quietly.
Sirens were approaching somewhere below, softened by forty-one floors of glass and concrete.
Nathan had heard sirens from the penthouse hundreds of times. Usually they belonged to another life at street level.
This time he counted the seconds between them.
Sophie’s grip loosened.
He looked down.
“Sophie.”
“I’m awake.”
“Stay with me.”
“I am.”
Vanessa said, “She needs a doctor, not an interrogation.”
Nathan glanced at her.
“That’s the first useful thing you’ve said.”
Her mouth opened.
Closed.
The private elevator sounded in the foyer less than five minutes later.
The paramedics entered first, followed by two uniformed police officers because the dispatcher had flagged possible medication tampering. The room changed as soon as strangers began asking practical questions. Names. Ages. Allergies. What Sophie had taken. When she had eaten. Whether she had lost consciousness.
Nathan moved back because he was told to move back.
He hated it.
Sophie answered some questions herself. Others took too long. The paramedic nearest her, a woman with short gray hair and the unhurried manner of someone who had learned that panic did not improve emergencies, told Sophie to take her time.
Vanessa stood near the windows.
One of the officers asked her not to leave.
She said, “Of course.”
Nathan almost corrected her.
Five minutes earlier she had been reaching for her bag.
He kept the thought to himself.
A paramedic picked up the cracked amber bottle with gloved fingers and read the label.
“Is this hers?”
“Yes,” Nathan said.
“No,” Sophie whispered.
Everyone looked at her.
She stared at the bottle.
“That’s mine, but those aren’t.”
The paramedic tilted it carefully.
Several tablets remained inside.
“What do you mean?”
“They look wrong.”
Nathan stepped closer.
Sophie licked dry lips.
“My pills are smaller.”
Vanessa turned toward the windows.
The officer nearest her noticed.
So did Nathan.
The paramedic put the bottle into a clear evidence bag after conferring with the officer. Nothing about the exchange was dramatic. There was no accusation, no handcuffing, no declaration that a crime had been committed.
That almost made Nathan feel worse.
The ordinary procedure of it suggested that terrible things could enter a life without changing the fluorescent color of a medical bag or the bored professionalism of a police radio.
When the paramedics lifted Sophie onto the stretcher, she reached for Nathan.
He took her hand.
Vanessa stepped forward.
“Sophie.”
Sophie turned her face away.
Vanessa stopped.
A police officer asked Nathan whether he wanted to ride in the ambulance.
“Yes.”
The second officer asked if he could first forward the recovered security clip or provide access to the system.
Nathan hesitated.
His instinct was to protect everything. His home. His files. Sophie’s privacy. Every recording that might show them arguing, eating dinner, walking half-dressed through their own living room.
Then Sophie’s fingers moved against his.
He handed the officer the phone.
“Take whatever you need.”
Vanessa looked at him.
It was only a look.
But Nathan understood it.
That was the first thing that could not be undone.
The ambulance ride to the hospital lasted eleven minutes.
Nathan knew because he watched the digital clock above the rear doors.
Sophie lay strapped to the stretcher with an IV in her arm. Her cardigan had been removed and folded beside her. Without it she seemed smaller, the ivory fabric of her dress too formal beneath the medical leads.
Nathan sat where he was told to sit.
His black coat was still buttoned.
He did not notice until Sophie said, “You look ridiculous.”
He stared at her.
Her eyes were closed.
“What?”
“The coat.”
He looked down.
He was dressed as though he were about to step into a January wind.
It was May.
He unbuttoned it.
Sophie’s mouth moved a fraction.
Not a smile exactly.
The paramedic checked her blood pressure.
Nathan said, “How bad is it?”
“We’re treating what we see. The hospital will run labs.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t know yet.”
Nathan nodded.
It was a sentence he disliked more than almost any other.
His entire adult life had been built around reducing the number of things he did not know.
At thirty-three, he managed capital for the family investment company his father had started and then spent fifteen years insisting was not a family company. Nathan could read a debt schedule at two in the morning, remember clauses from contracts he had not opened in months, and identify people lying in a negotiation because they changed the way they used pronouns.
None of that helped him understand how his wife had ended up on their rug asking him to protect her from her closest friend.
Sophie opened her eyes.
“Where is she?”
“Police kept her there.”
“Did they arrest her?”
May you like
“No.”
Sophie stared at the ceiling.
