Chương 3
The phone lay beside Ava’s hand.
One beige cardigan button had broken off and rested near the lowest stair.
Daniel’s eyes returned to Victoria.
“Which one of you touched my wife?”
The words produced an almost physical silence.
Victoria’s lips parted.
Behind her, Eleanor slowly looked at her daughter.
“Your wife?” Victoria said.
Ava watched recognition arrive in pieces.
Daniel Cross.
Not Daniel from Ava’s careful, evasive references over the last year.
Not the man Victoria had imagined when Ava said her husband traveled often and preferred privacy.
Not someone who could be bullied through a family dinner and then forgotten.
Daniel Cross.
Victoria went pale.
Daniel stepped around her.
He dropped to one knee beside Ava but did not touch her immediately.
“What hurts?”
“Everything.”
“That’s not useful.”
Despite herself, Ava made a sound that might have been a laugh.
His hand hovered beside hers.
“Can I touch you?”
“Yes.”
He took her fingers.
“The baby moved,” she said.
“When?”
“After I fell.”
“Since then?”
Ava waited.
Nothing.
Her relief vanished as quickly as it had come.
“I don’t know.”
Daniel looked toward Margaret.
“Ambulance?”
“On the way.”
One of his security men, Marcus Hale, moved toward the entrance and began speaking quietly into his phone, arranging gate access.
Victoria said, “Daniel, I need to explain.”
He did not look at her.
“No.”
“You don’t know what happened.”
Eleanor said, “I do.”
Daniel looked up.
Eleanor stood six steps above them, one hand wrapped around the balustrade.
“She pushed Ava.”
Victoria made a broken sound.
“Mother.”
Eleanor flinched at the word.
It was the first sign that the sentence had cost her anything.
Then the door chime sounded somewhere deeper in the house, absurdly polite against the distant rise of sirens.
Margaret looked toward the entry.
“The paramedics.”
Daniel squeezed Ava’s hand.
Ava closed her eyes.
For the next several minutes, nobody cared who was married to whom.
The paramedics cut through questions with professional indifference.
Where did she strike?
How many stairs?
Loss of consciousness?
Bleeding?
Contractions?
Head impact?
Medication?
Allergies?
Ava answered what she could.
When one paramedic asked whether the fall was accidental, Victoria said, “Yes.”
Eleanor said, “No.”
At exactly the same time.
The younger paramedic looked from one to the other.
Then at Ava.
Ava was strapped to the stretcher, one hand around Daniel’s wrist.
“She pushed me,” Ava said.
Victoria stepped backward.
Daniel did not move.
The statement entered the room differently from Eleanor’s.
Ava felt it.
Eleanor felt it too.
Perhaps Victoria did.
Until then, it was still possible to imagine this as a family catastrophe, something ugly that could be contained inside the Bennett house, cleaned up with lawyers and explanations and the sort of phone calls wealthy people made when they wanted reality rearranged.
Ava’s sentence made it something else.
One of the paramedics nodded.
“Okay.”
Nothing theatrical followed.
No one handcuffed Victoria.
No one gave a speech.
They wheeled Ava through the open doors into the cold evening, and she caught one brief look at the chandelier reflected upside down in the dark glass above the entrance.
Daniel climbed into the ambulance with her.
For most of the ride, he said nothing.
The paramedic attached monitors and asked questions. Ava tried to answer without watching Daniel’s face. He was sitting on the narrow bench beside her feet, elbows on his knees, hands clasped so tightly that the tendons stood out beneath his skin.
“Daniel.”
He looked up.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Plan anybody’s death.”
“I’m not.”
“You have the face.”
“What face?”
“The one from Frankfurt.”
The paramedic glanced between them and wisely returned his attention to the monitor.
Daniel leaned back.
“The Frankfurt situation did not involve murder.”
“It involved a man crying in a hotel lobby.”
“He had committed procurement fraud.”
“He was still crying.”
“He was emotional.”
Ava shut her eyes.
There was the quiet, constant flicker of the fetal monitor they had placed against her abdomen for transport.
Not a perfect reading.
Not enough for reassurance.
But something.
Daniel touched the edge of the blanket near her ankle.
“You married a ridiculous person,” Ava whispered.
“So did you.”
At the hospital, the ridiculousness ended.
A nurse took Ava upstairs for obstetric trauma evaluation. Daniel was allowed into the room after an initial assessment but asked to stay out while they changed Ava and examined the bruising along her hip and ribs.
Ava sat on the edge of the bed wearing a hospital gown that refused to close properly across her back and stared at her bare feet.
One ankle was swollen.
There was dried blood along two knuckles where her hand had scraped the stair.
She noticed, with inappropriate irritation, that her left big toenail polish had chipped.
She had painted it herself three nights earlier and nearly become trapped on the bathroom floor trying to stand afterward.
Daniel had found her there.
He had leaned against the doorframe and watched her struggle.
“Need help?”
“No.”
“You’ve been trying to stand for forty seconds.”
“I have a system.”
“Your system appears to be failing.”
She had thrown a towel at him.
Now a nurse named Connie sat beside the bed and fastened two monitoring bands around Ava’s abdomen.
“One for the baby’s heart rate,” Connie said. “One for contractions.”
“I know.”
Connie glanced at her.
“First baby?”
Ava swallowed.
“First one who made it this far.”
Connie’s expression softened without becoming pity.
“All right.”
That was all she said.
Ava liked her immediately.
Daniel returned when the examination was finished.
He carried Ava’s damaged phone in one hand and her cream cardigan in the other. Someone had put the broken button into a small plastic evidence bag because the police officer downstairs thought the clothing might matter if the account of the shove was disputed.
The sight of the bag made Ava unexpectedly nauseous.
Daniel set everything on a chair.
“How’s the phone?”
“Alive.”
May you like
“That’s more than I can say for the case.”
“It did its job.”
