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Properly taken care of by a man who loved her.
“I want you,” he said hoarsely.
“You can have me—”
“No, I can’t—”
“Daniel—”
“You want to know why I went to Gus’s frickin’ hospital room as soon as I got home?” he snapped. “It wasn’t to see how he was doing. I wanted some Cialis so I could maybe get it up for you—and you know what he told me? My heartbeat’s fucked up so he ‘wouldn’t advise it.’?” Daniel dragged a hand down his face. “The punchline? That fucking drugis used to improve the effectiveness of some cancer treatments. Ha ha. I’m a fucking outlier only when it bites me in the ass.”
As her face tightened in commiseration with his disappointment, he had a fresh wave of anger that he was putting her through so much shit.
“I’m sorry…” He rubbed his eyes and then closed them again. “The last thing you need is me going off the deep end. But I feel like I’m already dead and I—”
“Look at me.”
“—don’t know what I’m doing, what I’m saying—”
“Daniel.”
“What.” When she didn’t answer, he had no choice but to glance over. “I…—”
His breath caught. She had taken her fleece and shirt off, and was standing before him bare-chested and unapologetic about it, her breasts bathed in that light, her nipples standing out in stark relief.
“Fuck me, Daniel,” she said in a guttural voice. “Now.”
TWENTY-FOUR
JUST AFTER LYDIAand Daniel backed into their bedroom and kicked their door shut, Cathy walked down to her study and closed herself in her workspace. As she glanced around at the austere decor, she thought, Christ, would it kill her to add a little color. In a rug, maybe. A fricking throw pillow.
A damn bouquet of flowers?
Annoyed with herself, and so many other things, she went to her desk and sat down. Out of reflex, she leaned over the glossy top and checked her reflection.
“Holy shit.”
As opposed to the perma-composure she had always cultivated, her hair was a floppy mess, all kinds of blond stalks shooting off in all kinds of different directions. Running her hands through things, she tried to put some order into her follicles, but really, the stuff growing out of her head was just half the problem. The bags under her eyes were something you’d have to check at TSA, andthe lack of makeup really let the sallow cast to her skin shine.
She was clean; that was about all she had going for her—and it was going to have to be enough.
Sitting back, she wrapped Gus’s fleece around herself and crossed her legs. She needed to check her email, but she knew what she was going to find there. She needed to check her phone messages, but she knew what she was going to find there. She needed to…
Start wrapping things up.
Glancing around again, she’d always intended to die here in this house: This was supposed to be her toe-tag property. For most people, that was an old-age thing, but not for her. Still, that had been the plan. The banks, however, weren’t going to let that happen. The debt she’d taken on was attached, like its own kind of cancer, to any asset she had—and as with metastasis, it had spread through her stock portfolio, this real estate, the equipment in the lab, her cars, the art. She had pushed her leverage as far and as hard as it could go to buy herself time to run the lab with all of its employees and expenses. Each day and night was another advancement in experimentation, results analysis, and new compound ideas, even as Vita-12b had been the real horse to bet on.
So much had been riding on that initial human test, and the fact that she’d been prepared todo it herself had been a kind of poetic justice, a money-where-her-mouth-was moment. Except then the pregnancy had happened, and Gus had left the company—and everything had gotten even worse after that.
She had never once considered leaving the drug to any child she might have or had any second thoughts on those documents she’d signed. The compound really was Gus’s, the result of his brilliant mind and all his hard work. Besides, she had done some very ethically questionable things in pursuit of her business goals.
Contaminating her baby with all that had been a wrong-foot-start that she hadn’t been interested in.
Putting her hand on her belly, she felt the ache in her heart kindle up. The sorrow and emptiness behind her sternum were on a rheostat, she was discovering, flaring and subsiding depending on what her focus was at any particular time. But they were never not there—
A light flashed underneath the desk’s plane of glass, and she closed her eyes and shook her head. Then she reached under the lip, pushed a button, and a seam opened on the expanse. Like Cinderella’s glass slipper on a tufted pillow, the black office phone presented itself as a gift, its base rising up. There was no sound associated with the incoming call, just the light. She hated ringing.
On the digital display, instead of numbers, the word “BLOCKED” appeared.
