Chương 2
He looked like someone standing outside a locked room that had once belonged to him.
“Is she going to die?” Iris asked.
The paramedic answered before Griffin could. “She’s breathing, and her heart rhythm has settled down. We’re taking good care of her.”
“That doesn’t answer it,” Iris said.
“No,” the paramedic replied. “It doesn’t.”
Griffin leaned forward, forearms on his thighs. “Your mother is going to have doctors around her very soon.”
“You don’t know that she’ll be okay,” Iris said.
“No.”
Hazel disliked the answer and trusted it anyway.
At the hospital, a nurse guided the twins into a family room with a vinyl sofa, a humming vending machine, and a television mounted too high on the wall. Griffin followed until another nurse stopped him.
“Relationship to the patient?”
He looked through the glass panel in the door. Sloan had disappeared behind a curtain.
“Old friend.”
The nurse waited.
“Potential father of her children,” he added.
The nurse’s expression changed by less than an inch. “You’ll need to wait here.”
Daniel arrived fifteen minutes later carrying two dry coats, a charger, and the particular kind of silence expensive people seemed to purchase with their security services. Griffin told him to take the helicopter crew back to Boeing Field and keep the rooftop clear for emergency access.
Daniel glanced at the twins.
“Understood.”
“And no calls to the office.”
“Your board dinner—”
“Cancel it.”
“The Singapore group has already arrived.”
“Then they’ve traveled far enough to learn disappointment.”
Daniel left.
Hazel sat on the floor because the sofa smelled like bleach and old sleep. Iris sat beside her, shoulder touching shoulder. Griffin remained standing near the door.
“You can sit,” Hazel told him.
He did, though not near them.
For several minutes, nobody spoke. The television showed a cooking competition with captions on. A woman cried because her cake had collapsed.
Iris reached into the pocket of her dress and found a bent paper clip. She straightened it, then bent it again.
“Why are you in Mom’s phone?” Hazel asked.
Griffin looked toward the closed door.
“Because I knew her a long time ago.”
“How long?”
“Nine years.”
“Before us.”
“Yes.”
“Did you love her?”
Iris hissed Hazel’s name.
“What?” Hazel said. “He might leave when Mom wakes up.”
Griffin clasped his hands. His knuckles were scraped, though not bleeding. “I did.”
“Did she love you?”
“I thought she did.”
“That’s not what she asked,” Iris said.
He looked at her. “Yes. I think she did.”
Hazel rested her chin on her knees. “Then why didn’t she tell us about you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you know about us?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Iris bent the paper clip until it snapped.
Griffin flinched at the small sound.
A doctor entered at nearly one in the morning. Sloan had suffered an episode of abnormal heart rhythm, likely worsened by exhaustion, dehydration, and prolonged stress. She had also struck her head when she fell, though initial imaging showed no serious injury. They were keeping her for observation.
“She’s awake,” the doctor said, “but she’s disoriented and very tired.”
Hazel stood so fast that her knee cracked against the coffee table.
“Can we see her?”
“One at a time for now.”
The twins argued in whispers, each insisting the other should go first. Griffin watched them until Hazel pointed at him.
“You choose.”
He seemed startled by the responsibility.
“Iris was holding her hand,” he said. “Maybe she should go first.”
Hazel nodded, though disappointment tightened her mouth.
Iris disappeared with the nurse. Griffin sat beside Hazel after she left, leaving the width of one cushion between them.
“You have a helicopter,” Hazel said.
“Yes.”
“Mom says helicopters are an obnoxious way to cross a city unless somebody is bleeding or the bridge has fallen down.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “That sounds like Sloan.”
“She also says billionaires are usually people who found a legal way to take too much.”
“That also sounds like Sloan.”
“Are you a billionaire?”
“Yes.”
“Did you take too much?”
He looked at his silver watch, then unclasped it and placed it on the table as though it had become heavy.
“Probably.”
Hazel studied him. “Mom doesn’t say probably when she means yes.”
“No,” he said. “She doesn’t.”
When Iris returned, her face was calmer and worse. She sat beside Hazel and pressed her broken paper clip into Griffin’s palm.
“Mom wants to see you.”
Griffin closed his fingers around it.
The hospital room was dim except for the monitor light and the city glow beyond the blinds. Sloan lay propped against white pillows. Without makeup and anger, she looked younger than thirty-four and more exhausted than any person Griffin had ever seen.
He stopped inside the doorway.
Her eyes opened.
For several seconds, the years between them seemed to rearrange themselves, searching for a shape that made sense.
“You came,” she said.
“You called.”
“I didn’t.”
“Hazel did.”
Her eyelids closed briefly. “Of course she did.”
He moved closer but stayed beyond the rail of the bed. “Are they mine?”
Sloan looked toward the door.
“You met them for less than an hour, and that’s your first question?”
“My first question was whether you were alive.”
“You asked that question to a doctor.”
“Because you were unconscious.”
“And now I’m not.”
He drew a slow breath. “Are Hazel and Iris my daughters?”
The monitor marked the silence between them.
“They may be,” she said.
He stared at her. “May be?”
“Biology isn’t a courtroom oath.”
“You know what I’m asking.”
“I know exactly what you’re asking. You want a clean answer that lets you decide what role to play next.”
“I want the truth.”
“You want possession of the truth.”
His jaw tightened.
May you like
The old reflex was visible to her even after nine years: he pressed the tip of his tongue once against the inside of his cheek before saying something cruel. He caught himself this time.
“Did you ever intend to tell me?”
