Chương 3
He followed them.
Claire blocked him before he reached the elevator.
“No.”
The word came out quietly.
Adrian stopped.
“You donated,” she said. “He has what he needs. Now you leave.”
Behind him, hospital security officers had surrounded Gavin and the other men, not touching them but making the boundaries clear. Alvarez stood several feet away, watching.
Adrian’s gaze moved from Claire to Ethan.
“He is my son.”
“He is my son. You met him four minutes ago.”
“Because you hid him.”
“Because I knew what would happen if you found him.”
“What happened without me?”
The elevator doors tried to close. Maya put out an arm to stop them.
Claire felt heat climb her neck.
“Do you think this proves you were right?” she asked. “Do you think walking into the room with men and metal shutters proves he needed you?”
“He needed my blood.”
“He needed a hospital. You turned it into a siege.”
Adrian looked as if she had struck him, though he did not move.
The elevator alarm began beeping.
Dr. Ruiz, inside with Ethan, said, “Either get in or continue ruining each other’s lives somewhere my patient can’t hear it.”
Claire stepped backward.
Adrian entered after her.
Gavin tried to follow.
“No,” Adrian said.
The doors closed between them.
Inside the elevator, nobody spoke. Claire watched the floor numbers change. Adrian stood across from her, one hand pressed over the gauze on his arm. His shirt cuff remained folded back. Without his jacket, without his men, without the movement of his arrival, he seemed less like an empire and more like a man who had been asked to account for seven missing years in the space between two floors.
Ethan’s monitor sounded with each weak heartbeat.
Adrian looked at him and said, “What does he like?”
Claire stared.
“What?”
“My son. What does he like?”
“This is not the time.”
“I may not get another one.”
The elevator rose.
Claire looked down at Ethan’s dinosaur shirt.
“Trains,” she said despite herself. “Not the electric kind. The wooden ones that never fit back in the box.”
Adrian nodded once.
“He hates bananas unless they’re cut in circles. He sleeps sideways. He pretends he can’t read when he doesn’t like a book. He knows the names of fifty dinosaurs and makes up six more when adults test him.”
A corner of Dr. Ruiz’s mouth moved, but she kept her eyes on the monitor.
“He’s afraid of automatic toilets,” Claire continued. “He says the flush comes too early.”
Adrian lowered his gaze.
“He asks about his father every birthday,” she said. “That part you don’t get to make about you.”
The elevator doors opened.
Medical staff rushed Ethan toward surgery. Claire followed until a pair of automatic doors closed in front of her.
For one terrible second, she could see her son through the glass.
Then he turned a corner and disappeared.
The surgical waiting room had twelve chairs, a coffee machine, two dead plants, and a television mounted too high on the wall. A morning news program played without sound. The hosts smiled beside a graphic about grocery prices.
Claire sat in the nearest chair.
Adrian remained standing.
“Sit down,” she said. “You’re making the room smaller.”
He chose a chair across from her. For several minutes they listened to the coffee machine make a grinding sound no one had asked it to make.
Claire rubbed her thumb across the crescent marks Ethan’s nails had left in her palm.
“How did you know?” she asked.
Adrian looked at her.
“About the hospital. About him. About the blood.”
He removed his phone from his jacket and placed it on the low table between them.
A message filled the screen.
ST. VINCENT’S. TRAUMA FOUR. BRING YOUR BLOOD OR BURY YOUR SON.
Beneath it was a photograph of Ethan taken through the school fence. He wore a yellow backpack and carried a cardboard volcano under one arm.
Claire stopped breathing.
The photograph had been taken at least three weeks earlier. She remembered the volcano. It had leaked red paint on the passenger seat of her car, and Ethan had cried because the eruption looked “too much like ketchup.”
“Who sent it?”
“The number is dead.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“No.”
“Did Gavin see this?”
“He was with me when it arrived.”
“Who else?”
“Two members of my technical staff.”
“You have technical staff for threatening messages?”
“I have technical staff for many things.”
There it was. The part of Adrian that had never needed explanation.
Claire stood and walked to the window. Below, rain moved across the parking structure in gray sheets. A delivery driver in a red jacket ran toward the main entrance with a paper bag under his coat.
Behind her, Adrian said, “I didn’t know you were pregnant.”
“You knew I left.”
“I searched for you.”
“I know.”
That made him look up.
Claire rested her forehead against the cool glass. “A man came to my sister’s apartment in Milwaukee six months after I disappeared. He asked where I was. He broke her kitchen chair when she said she didn’t know.”
“I didn’t order that.”
“You paid people who believed breaking chairs was a reasonable question.”
Adrian said nothing.
“I moved again,” she continued. “Then again. I changed my last name. I stopped calling my sister. She died thinking I didn’t trust her.”
“What happened?”
“Cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t get to be sorry for everything. Sometimes you just have to be the reason it happened.”
He leaned back in the plastic chair. The hospital light found silver at one of his temples.
After a while, he said, “Why did you leave that night?”
Claire almost laughed. It came out as breath.
“You really don’t know.”
“I know what I assumed.”
“What did you assume?”
May you like
“That you found the ledger in my office. That you believed I’d used you. That you were afraid I would use you back.”
“You had three men beaten in a loading yard.”
